Heightened Demand for Audiobooks and eBooks: Print books are still the most popular book format (65% of people read a print book in 2019). 25% of adults read an eBook during that year as well. 20% of U.S. consumers have listened to an audiobook in the last year. Industry reports show that sales of audiobooks have seen continuous growth since 2012 with revenue up 14.3% year-over-year.
TikTok owner, ByteDance, has entered the digital publishing industry with its launch of a reading app featuring AI narrators.
Increased Self-Publishing: Self-published books have increased since 2010 and rapidly climbed to more than 1.6 million books by 2018. In 2020, the pandemic and the popularity of eBooks propelled the trend even further.
Smashwords, a distributor that accounts for nearly half of all self-published eBooks, reported a 5.3% increase in authors served and a 5.7% increase in books published last year alone. New authors are lured by self-publishing because complete control over choosing a cover design, managing editing and price point is irresistible and makes economic sense.
The Rise of Digital Marketing: Authors have discovered that email marketing is 100x more effective in driving book sales and have combined that approach with promoting their books on social media via virtual author events. Posting on TikTok has created a new platform - the wildly popular #booktok has over 41 billion video views which boasts user-generated marketing content.
Techs Competitive Edge: Publishers are on the brink of perfecting Artificial Intelligence to write books. Other uses for AI are content classification, acquisitions, plagiarism checks, and book marketing.
Virtual literary events across multiple platforms are drawing crowds of more than 500K people, and publishers are tracking consumer behavior and data like never before with #bookstgrammer claiming 12 million posts (and counting). Not to be outdone, #booktubers have created an online community via YouTube.
The publishing industry is continually seeking new experiences for readers with tech driving positive disruption. Tomestic has identified an opportunity to harness extended reality to reach and engage our audience with an enhanced level of interactivity and entertainment. Our hybrid medium of publishing, digital production, and information technology merges physical and digital worlds to create an unforgettable immersive reading experience. We’re primed to recreate the medium of books!
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