After almost 30 years, Amazon’s original book business is booming, leaked document shows

Reliable data on this industry is limited or tightly controlled, so it’s sometimes difficult to get handle on the scope of the book business. This makes the new Amazon data particularly notable, especially as antitrust questions still linger about the company’s dominance of the sector.

In the first 10 months of 2022, Amazon had $16.9 billion in gross merchandise sales from its books category, the document shows. GMS measures the total sales volume of print and digital books, including e-books and audiobooks.

That translates to nearly $1.7 billion in average monthly book sales volume, or roughly $400 million per week. In the US alone, Amazon recorded about $9.5 billion in total book sales volume in those 10 months.

This shows how well Amazon has done in keeping its original business thriving over almost three decades. It also reveals how physical books have endured as a reading format, while ebooks have not lived up to their early promise when Amazon launched the Kindle e-reader back in 2007.

“There is nothing broken about books in print format. Many people, myself included, tend to prefer holding a book in our hands and reading a printed book,” said John Warren, a director and associate professor of George Washington University’s publishing program.

“Monopoly power”

Amazon’s book business has drawn antitrust scrutiny over the years. The Federal Trade Commission’s case against Amazon last year mentioned Amazon’s book segment, while the American Booksellers Association urged the FTC and the Justice Department to focus on the company’s “monopoly power” over the market.

The document obtained by BI is 25 pages long and is marked confidential. It was used for a weekly business review at Amazon. The company doesn’t publicly disclose book sales, nor does it give a revenue breakdown of each retail category.

In an email to BI, Amazon spokesperson Lindsay Hamilton said the company “continues to operate in a competitive bookselling environment,” where online retailers, national chains, and independent booksellers have “grown significantly” in recent years.

The US accounts for over half of the sales

The document reveals a few staggering numbers that show how big Amazon’s book business is.

Here are a few standout sales figures:

• Global: In January 2022, Amazon sold just over $2 billion worth of books. Sales volume dropped to around $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion in the following months.
• US: The US market is the biggest for Amazon, accounting for over a half of total books GMS. It had over $1.1 billion of GMS in January and August of 2022. In other months, GMS hovered around $900 million.
• Other markets: The three largest overseas markets were the UK, Germany, and Japan. Each country had between $130 million to $190 million in books GMS each month. FRITES, a geographic group that comprises France, Italy, and Spain, was similar in size.

• Japanese manga: The Japanese manga, or comic books market, was big enough to show up as its own line item. Amazon sold more than $35 million worth of manga every month, or roughly 11,000 units.

And here are the unit sales figures:

• Global: Amazon sold an average of 175 million books (both print and digital) each month during this period. In January 2022, it reported more than 193 million in unit sales, but in other months, it was closer to 170 million.
• US: In the US market, Amazon sold an average of 87 million books per month in the period. Over the first 10 months of 2022, the company sold 456.5 million print books and 419.8 million digital books.
• Other markets: In Japan, the company sold about 25 million units per month. The UK, Germany, and FRITES markets were between 11 million to 21 million units per month.

Mixed signals

Given Amazon’s GMS for books in the first 10 months of 2022 was close to $17 billion, it’s likely the company sold more than $20 billion worth of books for the full year.

While Amazon is a powerful player in the books business, it’s hard to tell whether the company is having an adverse impact on the market. Global book sales grew 8.8% in 2023 from 2019, according to industry data provider Circana. And the American Booksellers Association reported an 11% increase in memberships and 200 new independent bookstore openings in 2023.

Retailers are showing mixed signals. Barnes & Noble is on pace to open 50 new stores in 2024, the highest number of store openings in 15 years. But Costco recently decided to stop selling books, unless it’s the holidays or other special occasions. Booktopia, an online bookseller in Australia, is struggling to survive.

E-books versus print

One notable datapoint in the Amazon document is the difference between Amazon’s print and e-book revenue.

In the first 10 months of 2022, Amazon sold more than $7.4 billion worth of print books in the US, while e-books GMS were around $2 billion.

The gap in the average sales price for the two book formats was also notable. Print books had an average sales price of around $15 versus roughly $4.50 for e-books, according to the document.

While Amazon was a pioneer in e-books, this data indicates that digital book formats may not have grown as fast as many industry experts once predicted.

A 2022 survey from the Pew Research Center showed that print book readers in the US still far outpaced the number of e-book readers, with 65% of adults saying they had read a print book in the past 12 months compared to 30% who picked up an e-book.

Warren, the associate professor from George Washington University, told BI that e-books were once anticipated to take nearly 80% of the market. But those projections have largely failed to live up to expectations, as print books are still the preferred mode of reading for many people. Still, he said, digital formats represent an “increasingly important part” of most publishers’ revenue.

Amazon’s statement

Hamilton, the Amazon spokesperson, shared some other thoughts, touching on the internal document and the company’s book business in an emailed statement:

“Amazon has a written narrative culture, which means at any given time there are thousands of documents moving around the company, providing information at a point in time and with varying levels of review and accuracy,” Hamilton wrote. “We’re on a mission to inspire customers to read more and get the most out of reading. We offer innovative, unparalleled reading experiences; the widest possible selection; options for our customers to read how they want, when they want; and a variety of affordable ways to read.”

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