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

The EU said the merger doesn’t threaten competition. In a press release, the European Commission said of its investigation:

“The Commission assessed the impact of the transaction on the upstream markets for the acquisition of authors’ rights for English language books in the European Economic Area (EEA) and worldwide, and on the downstream markets for the sale of English language books to dealers in the EEA, in particular in the UK and Ireland. The Commission found that on both types of markets the new entity Penguin Random House will continue to face competition from several large and numerous small and medium sized publishers. As regards the sale of English language books, the merged entity will furthermore face a concentrated retail base, such as supermarkets for print books and large online retailers for ebooks, like Amazon. In addition, the Commission’s investigation revealed no evidence that the transaction would lead to risks of coordination among publishers in relation to the acquisition of authors’ rights and the sale of English language books to dealers.”

As I reported last month, Random House and Penguin announced their merger last October and the U.S. Department of Justice approved it in February, followed by Australia and New Zealand. Random House’s parent company Bertelsmann would own 53 percent of the combined company, and Penguin parent company Pearson would hold 47 percent. Random House Penguin’s goal is to enter emerging markets and expand its digital business.

The merger awaits approval by Canada and China.

Unidentified sources “cautioned that a deal isn’t imminent.”

Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins declined to comment.

It seems clear that News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch is in a book publisher-buying mood: News Corp. had previously expressed interest in buying Pearson’s Penguin, right after Random House and Penguin’s talks to merge became public. News Corp is in the process of spinning off its publishing unit, including HarperCollins, into a separate company, and Murdoch recently said that the company will provide more details about the spinoff “by the end of the calendar year.”

Simon & Schuster’s revenues totaled $787 million in 2011, and according to CBS’s most recent earnings report, digital sales (ebook and audiobooks) now make up 21 percent of the publisher’s total sales. News Corp has not released details about HarperCollins revenues in recent years.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge 

“Giving customers the widest choices at the fairest prices is at the heart of the agency model, and we believe this model should remain intact,” Barnes & Noble general counsel Eugene DeFelice said in a statement. “We want to help the Court fully understand the significant consequences of any action that would erode such a pro-competition, pro-consumer model, and that is the purpose of our filing.”

“ABA and Barnes & Noble are well-positioned to highlight the anti-consumer, anticompetitive, and anti-business effects that the Proposed Final Judgment is likely to cause,” the companies write in their filing, adding, “This Court should not accept the opinion of DOJ and 19 entities as representing ‘the public interest’ as against nearly 800 commenters who opposed the Proposed Final Judgment – specially without hearing from ABA, which is comprised of 1,600 independent booksellers, and Barnes & Noble, which is the world’s largest bookseller.”

The companies also note that “if the Court were not to permit ABA and Barnes & Noble to serve as amici in this matter, it is likely that DOJ’s numerous arguments in that filing that are specifically directed against Barnes & Noble and ABA, complete with their factual inaccuracies, would go unrebutted by any party currently before the Court.”

The court has granted the ABA and Barnes & Noble permission to file a 10-page brief by August 15, 2012.

Amicus briefs are common in high-profile lawsuits, and the lawsuit against Apple and book publishers is garnering particular attention. As noted above, the Department of Justice received 868 public comments about its proposed settlement with three of the book publishers, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster (Apple, Penguin and Macmillan will fight the case in court). Attorney and RoyaltyShare CEO Bob Kohn, who has been one of the most outspoken legal critics of the DOJ in the case, also plans to file an amicus brief within the next few weeks.