Paper books surge; e-books stall

With items as diverse as an adult coloring books and a new novel by Harper Lee, it was a year for unexpected hits and hits that sold well in paper editions.

As e-book sales remain stalled at about 25 percent of the market, hardcovers and paperbacks held steady at a time digital has upended the music, film and television industries. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks around 85 percent of the print market, sales of paper editions increased modestly in 2015. As of early December, 571 million units had sold, compared to 559 million in 2014.

Coloring books for grown-ups, a concept once as unusual as, say, a second of work of fiction from Lee, were the hottest trend. Led by Johanna Basford's Lost Ocean and Enchanted Forest, the phenomenon understandably caught on almost exclusively in the print format, and Basford has no desire to change that. Numerous apps have been designed for adult coloring, but Basford wants her work "experienced only on paper," said Patrick Nolan, Penguin Books' publisher.

Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy noted the rise of coloring books and of books by YouTube stars, another genre that did especially well in print. "Neither of these categories was a factor before this year," she said.

Paper all along has been especially popular for nonfiction and children's books, a tradition upheld for such top 2015 releases as David McCullough's The Wright Brothers and Bill O'Reilly's Killing Reagan. For Jeff Kinney's million-selling, illustrated Diary of Wimpy Kid: Old School, 95 percent of sales were for print, according to the Abrams imprint Amulet Books.

"I'm not surprised that physical book sales of Diary of a Wimpy Kid outstrip e-books by such a wide margin," Kinney wrote in a recent e-mail. "So much of the way kids experience the world these days is through a screen, but we instinctively know that the best way to get kids reading is by placing a book in their hands."

E-books have been most successful in adult fiction, with sales for Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See divided equally between print and digital even though there was little difference on Amazon.com between the cost for the hardcover ($15.29) and for the Kindle edition ($13.99).