Why produce BookStats?
For years, the Association of American Publishers and Book Industry Study Group each produced an annual survey to track publisher new revenue and unit sales, focusing on their separate areas of expertise. In 2010, recognizing that the entire industry was making strategic decisions in the midst of transformational changes around content creation, production and distribution, they partnered to design a new survey with a new analytic model to more effectively examine the total U.S. publishing industry from a 360 degree perspective.
Why cover 2008-2010?
To give BookStats subscribers comparable historical trend line views and permit the statistics team to validate year-over-year performance with numerous aspects of the cube data.
What are net revenue and net unit sales?
Figures used throughout are publishers’ reported sales figures and quantities inclusive of all discounts and credit for returns. Figures do not reflect consumers’ purchases or prices.
What’s the basis of BookStats’ methodology?
The cornerstone of BookStats’ methodology is its unprecedented breadth of publisher source data.
The 1963 organizations that chose to participate represent the full spectrum of the U.S. publishing industry: large, medium and small; major content companies to non-profits; and the entire scope of consumer, educational, professional and scholarly markets.
Ancillary data sources from across the industry — coming from aggregate sales providers, booksellers, public documents and other outlets — were also incorporated in the methodology.
How were the publishers organized?
Source data was first segmented into separate sales tiers. This provides subscriber with perspective on publishers of similar size. It also enabled the statisticians, working with additional databases and resources, to extrapolate an accurate accounting of the full size of the industry.
Publishers were broken into seven tiers according to annual net revenue, from those earning less than $100,000 to more than $500 million.
Why create an analytical cube and how can it be used?
BookStats’ model cube has three sides: format, category and distribution channel. The cube enables rich analysis through the online data dashboard, which has customizable filtering and cross tabs across the three dimensions.
The cube permits examination of BookStats data in a variety of ways. For instance, a user can determine the digital revenues in Higher Education content sold online or the number of Hardcover Non-Fiction books sold to Independent Retail.