Internet Publishing & Web Search Portals NAICS 519290

May 13, 2025 - Decreasing Nonfiction Paperback Sales may Be Partly Due To Increasing E-book Sales

• Publishers are printing fewer nonfiction paperbacks, according to Jeffrey Trachtenberg, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers book publishing and media. New adult nonfiction paperback titles have decreased 42% in the past five years, primarily because new books are typically published first in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook format. Consumers who don’t want to pay $32 for a new nonfiction hardcover book can immediately buy the $15 e-book or you could listen to it on audio, and audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of book publishing today, according to Trachtenberg.
• Bookshop, an online marketplace for independent bookstores, has launched an e-book app for Android and Apple devices. The app allows customers to buy digital books from more than 2,000 partnering independent bookstores which receive a portion of sales. E-books are about 1 of every 6 books sold and independent bookstores aren’t part of that business, according to Bookshop founder Andy Hunter. Amazon is estimated to control as much as 50% of the physical-book market and at least 80% of the e-book market, thanks in part to its popular Kindle e-reader.

• More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, according to a study published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Researchers say that the results of an examination of more than seven million digitally published items indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output. Kate Wittenberg, managing director of the digital archiving service Portico, warns that small publishers are at higher risk of failing to preserve articles than are large ones. “It costs money to preserve content,” she says, adding that archiving involves infrastructure, technology, and expertise that many smaller organizations do not have access to.
• Internet publishing and web search portal industry employment increased slightly during the first month of 2025, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Internet publishing and search portal sales are forecast to increase at an 8.37% compounded annual rate from 2024 to 2028, faster than the growth of the overall economy, according to Inforum and the Interindustry Economic Research Fund, Inc.