Some other findings from the report, whose topline figures were released Wednesday:

• Adult fiction is the largest driver of ebook growth, but adult nonfiction and children’s/young adult titles also grew over 2011:

• Sales of hardcovers and trade paperbacks remained steady in 2012, but the mass market paperback continued its decline. This format is particularly affected by competition from ebooks, BookStats says, because ebooks are released at the same time as hardcovers while mass market paperbacks are released later.
• Online retail continues to grow as a sales channel, though BookStats cautions that, because its statistics reflect publishers’ net revenues from sales channels and not retailers’ revenue from consumers, these figures can’t serve as a completely accurate picture of the retail market.

• The total U.S. book market — including educational and professional/scholarly publishing — was $27.12 billion in 2012, BookStats estimates, down 0.9 percent from 2011.

Notes: BookStats is published jointly by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. (In the past, the groups conducted separate annual surveys.) The report incorporates net sales revenue and unit data reported by nearly 2,000 U.S. publishers. It also estimates the size of the entire industry.

The charts illustrating this post were created by me, not by BookStats.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Borys Shevchuk

BookStats 2012 collects data from 1,977 book publishers in four sectors (trade/consumer, school/K-12, higher ed, and professional/scholarly). Some top-level findings:

• Ebooks made up 15 percent of trade publishers’ net sales revenues, or $2.074 billion, in 2011, compared to just 6 percent ($869 million) in 2010. Ebooks also account for 15.5 percent of trade publishers’ unit sales, with 388 million units sold — up from 5 percent (125 million units sold) in 2010. (Note: “Ebooks” here is defined as “all primary e-formats: ebooks, enhanced ebooks and paid mobile apps.”)

• Trade book sales are relatively flat. Trade publishers pulled in a total of $13.97 billion in revenues in 2011, compared to $13.90 in 2010 — a 0.5 percent increase.
• The total U.S. book market decreased slightly. Revenues from all book publishers were $27.2 billion in 2011, compared to $27.9 billion in 2010.
• Publishers are selling more books, though. While revenues were down slightly, unit sales were up 3.4 percent, to 2.77 billion books sold in 2011. (One reason for that could be more cheap ebooks.)
• Children’s/young adult books saw the highest growth of any category. Sales increased 12 percent in 2011, to $2.78 billion. The growth was driven largely by popular YA series like “The Hunger Games.”
• Bricks-and-mortar bookstores are still publishers’ primary sales channel. Physical bookstores accounted for 31.5 percent of publishers’ total net dollar sales in 2011 — but that was down 12.6 percent from 2010.

• Publishers’ direct-to-consumer sales nearly doubled, with revenue from direct sales hitting $1.1 billion in 2011 — up from $702 million in 2010, an increase of 58 percent. The AAP tells me that most of those direct sales were concentrated in the trade and higher education sectors.

Notes: BookStats is published jointly by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. (In the past, the groups conducted separate annual surveys.) The report is the most comprehensive look at the U.S. book publishing industry to date, incorporating net sales revenue and unit data reported 1,977 U.S. publishers. The report tracks sales and units by format (physical, digital, bundles); category; and channel. The full BookStats 2012 report is available for purchase here.

The charts illustrating this post were created by me, not by BookStats.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Borys Shevchuk

Here’s how a habit is formed: A cue leads to a routine leads to a reward. “Not a lot of attention has been paid to the cue or to the reward,” Duhigg says.

For example, BlackBerries were moderately popular until RIM figured out how to make the BlackBerry vibrate when a user got a new e-mail. The vibration was the cue, the routine was checking e-mail and the reward was “a moment of distraction.” Then “there was an explosion in the number of people checking their BlackBerries throughout the day,” Duhigg said. (Of course, now RIM’s in trouble partly because other devices — hello, iPhone — have found new and better ways to provide those moments of distraction.)

“Solving boredom is the #2 way to create habits”

“Books are perfectly positioned to take advantage of things that are habit-forming,” said Duhigg, because “solving boredom is the number-two way to create habits.” He pointed to The Atavist‘s e-singles, enhanced with video and pop-up images, as an example of “the bookification of Angry Birds.” Those enhancements can offer a “fast delivery of rewards.” (Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that enhanced e-books haven’t done very well, but that could be in part because publishers have tried to charge more for them.)

Or authors can offer “intermittent rewards” and the element of surprise — essentially by writing good books that offer something unexpected throughout.” Duhigg gave the example of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” as a book that “surprises you constantly.”

Some other findings from the survey:

E-books:
–E-books made up 6.4 percent of the trade book market in 2010, with a greater percentage expected in 2011. That’s up from 0.6 percent of the trade market in 2008
–E-book net revenue increased by 1274.1 percent between 2008 and 2010, to $878 million. E-book net sales increased by 1039.6 percent between 2008 and 2010, to 114 million.
–E-books now account for 13.6 percent of revenue from adult fiction.

Online retail:
–Between 2008 and 2010, as many customers have transitioned to shopping online and e-books sales have grown exponentially, online retail has become a major segment for book publishers. Publishers reported that their net sales revenue for content sold directly to online channels was $2.82 billion in 2010–growth of 55.2 percent over three years (an 18.8 percent increase between 2008 and 2009, accelerating to a 30.7 percent increase between 2009 and 2010.)
–Publishers’ net unit sales for content sold online grew by 68.6 percent between 2008 and 2010. Total net unit sales hit 276 million in 2010.

Trade books:
–Overall net sales revenue for trade book publishers increased by 5.8 percent between 2008 and 2010, with revenue for 2010 hitting $13.94 billion. Net unit sales increased by 4.5 percent during the period, to 2.26 billion units sold in 2010.and 2010, with net revenue increasing by 9.7 percent for the period and net unit sales increasing by 3.5 percent. Adult nonfiction sales grew by 3.5 percent.
–Kids’ books net sales grew by 7.1 percent during the period, with net unit sales up by 12.1 percent.

Higher education:
–A big success story: Higher education net sales revenue grew by 23.1 percent between 2008 and 2010, with net revenue in 2010 at $4.55 billion.

BookStats is published jointly by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. (In the past, the groups conducted separate annual surveys.) The report is the most comprehensive look at the U.S. book publishing industry to date, incorporating net sales revenue and unit data reported by almost 2,000 U.S. publishers. The report tracks sales and units by format (physical, digital, bundles); category; and channel. I should note that 2011 has been a year of major e-book growth, and it’s frustrating not to see 2011 stats included here, but hopefully BookStats will continue to release data throughout this year.