E-book sales at Hachette Book Group continued to decline in the first half of 2015, according to comments made by Lagardère, parent company of Hachette, in announcing six-month results yesterday.
In the U.S., sales of digital books represented 24% of trade sales January-June this year, compared to 29% in the same period in 2014. The company, which noted that e-book sales had begun a slowdown in January 2014, attributed the decline to "a less successful slate of new releases and the implementation of the agreement with Amazon [which was reached after contentious negotiations last year]." In other comments, Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch said that the slowdown in e-book sales came "in part due to e-retailers no longer discounting many e-books at a loss."
Lagardère noted that the digital book slowdown "remains limited to English-speaking countries [where digital books boomed first] and to the general literature segment."
Overall, Hachette Book Group sales fell 7.8%, partly because of the decline in e-book sales as well as a strong period in the first half of 2014, when The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith, Grain Brain by David Perlmutter and Kristin Loberg, I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt had high sales.
This year's successes so far, Pietsch said, have included "a Caldecott Medal for Dan Santat's Beekle and an Emmy Award for the audio of I Am Malala, shipping more than 2 million Minions books tying into the blockbuster movie, and hits like David Baldacci's Memory Man, James Patterson's The 14th Deadly Sin, Chris Colfer's The Land of Stories, Dana Perino's And the Good News Is… and Sandra Brown's Mean Streak.
