Sixty-one percent of book purchases by frequent book buyers take place online, but only seven percent of those buyers said they discovered that book online, while physical book stores account for 39 percent of units sold and 20 percent of discovery share: the stats come by way of new research from Peter Hildick-Smith, the founder and CEO of the Codex Group, which tracks frequent readers’ book-buying behavior. At the Digital Book World conference in New York on Thursday, he said that discovery and availability are being “decoupled” online. In other words, readers are likely to go online to buy a book after having learned about it elsewhere.

This wouldn’t be such a problem for the publishers and authors who want their books to be discovered if readers weren’t migrating their book-buying (both print and digital) online, but they are. Amazon.com accounted for over 25 percent of all book sales between January and September 2012 and 30 percent of dollars spent on books, Bowker research in another panel showed. Further, former Borders customers shifted their book-buying online and primarily to Amazon — not to other physical bookstores — when Borders went bankrupt. All together, this means that readers who would once have discovered a new author by browsing in a physical bookstore might never encounter that author now. (The shift to online buying presents particular difficulties for nonfiction: Twice as many works of nonfiction are sold in physical stores as online.)

“Something is really, chronically missing in online retail discovery,” Hildick-Smith said. But what might that something be? It’s not as if book buyers aren’t using online sites like Pinterest, Google and Goodreads — they are, but as the slide below shows, those sites simply aren’t converting to actual book purchases. (Note that apples aren’t compared to apples here: Amazon is compared to “Internet booksellers,” for example, and Goodreads is compared to “book-related websites.” What this is means is that the actual percentage of book purchases driven by any single site are even lower.)

© The Codex Group 2013, reproduced with permission and not for reproduction.

So how can book discovery improve and what can publishers do? A few ideas presented throughout the day:

Publishers should do more to protect physical bookstores

“Physical retail works if you protect it,” Hildick-Smith said. “Movie producers do [protect movie theaters]. I would argue publishers are not doing enough to help bookstores.”

In another panel, Michael Cader, the founder of PublishersMarketplace.com, noted that a lot of online book discovery (especially through Amazon) is driven by sales like the Kindle Daily Deal. “Price has been a big driver for online and particularly for ebooks,” he said. “Price innovation is what’s driving those markets. We haven’t seen price innovation at physical retail. Where are the daily deals in the physical bookstore?” He suggested that publishers, authors and retailers could work together to provide those deals.

New players in book retail

Simon Lipskar, the president of literary agency Writers House, imagined a possible outcome of the Random House-Penguin merger: “I would be totally shocked and actually completely disappointed if this merger did not lead to a serious entry into book retail,” he said. “We should not be surprised if that is physical retail as well as online retail.”

Hildick-Smith separately warned that entering digital book retail is very, very expensive. “The bar has been raised stratospherically high,” he said. “It’s big-stakes stuff. The biggest companies on the planet are wrestling for our little piece of turf.” But Random House Penguin might be large enough to stand a chance of competing against Amazon, Apple and Google on ebooks.

Amp up the reader reviews

As bookstores go away, “we need more powerful book reviewers online,” said Matthew Baldacci, VP and associate publisher at St. Martin’s, in a panel on discovery. He was referring not to professional reviewers for outlets like the New York Times but citizen reviewers with a role similar to “the role that booksellers used to take…if we’re forced into a situation where physical bookstores are going away, then we have to have these people who are help us sell our books.”

Allison Underwood, senior marketing manager at Open Road, underscored the importance of online reviews for books. The company has run “what we considered to be really strong online promotions,” but if the reader reviews on retail sites aren’t there to back the promotions up, they can fall flat. “You can have a really grand online campaign that gets the user right there, but then [a lack of reviews] can shut them down really quickly,” she said, to the point where “a red flag goes up and says, ‘Maybe you don’t actually want to buy this book.’”

For more on book discovery, see this follow-up post: Here’s the problem with book publishers’ discovery problem 

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Borys Shevchuk

This isn’t a completely accurate picture of the market, because a low-priced ebook that sells many copies is still not necessarily driving as much revenue as a higher-priced book a couple of spots lower down the list. In a new weekly bestseller list that launches today, book publishing website and community Digital Book World aims for a more accurate methodology by taking price into consideration.

“It is incredibly important for the fast emerging ebook marketplace to have clear, valid and authenticated data about both the dollar volume and unit volume of best sellers,” said David Nussbaum, chairman and CEO of Digital Book World’s parent company, publisher F+W Media. “Because it is still a very young business, the entire channel — authors, agents, publishers, and consumers — need clear and focused information about best sellers.”

The data for the list is provided by Dan Lubart of Iobyte Solutions, an IT strategy firm that has been examining the effects of price on ebook sales for awhile. Lubart was hired as HarperCollins’ SVP of sales analytics in December 2011, but his work with DBW is separate. Book publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company, Writers House president Simon Lipskar, Book Industry Study Group executive director Len Vlahos, and Bowker Market Research VP Kelly Gallagher also consulted on the list.

The list weights data from Kindle, Nook, Google, Kobo and Sony. Retailers are weighted based on market share and the books are organized into separate price categories. (More on methodology here.) ”As a combined list of all the retailers, it gives as unbiased a view as possible as to what people are really buying. By taking a weekly view, this list will smooth out the one-day sales spikes from the daily deals and reveal the true best-sellers,” said Lubart.

Here’s this week’s top-25 overall list (links for the price-banded categories are on the same page). DBW notes that big-six publishers and high price points dominate the list. “Scholastic, with its popular Hunger Games series, and Soho Press, a New York-based independent publisher, were the only two publishers outside of the six largest in the U.S. to break the top 25 on the list,” Digital Book World editor Jeremy Greenfield notes.

The survey was conducted among book publishing executives at publishers across the U.S. that represent 74 percent of U.S. publishing revenues. Forrester will present the full results of the study at Digital Book World in NYC on January 24, but the initial findings are as follows:

– 82 percent of respondents are optimistic about the digital transition, down from 89 percent a year ago.

– 61 percent of respondents believe readers will be better off as a result of the digital transition, down from 74 percent in 2010.

– 60 percent of respondents believe more people will read than before, down from 66 percent in 2010.

– 47 percent of respondents believe people will read a greater number of books than before, down from 66 percent in 2010 — a 19 percent decrease.

“People are generally optimistic still, but that optimism is waning,” said Forrester’s James McQuivey. “Publishers have started to do the hard work of making the digital transition and they’re finding that it is, indeed, hard work.”

These initial findings don’t speculate on the reasons why publishers are increasingly bummed out, but a few thoughts: 2011 was a tough year, marked by the death of Borders; Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) also expanded hard into publishing. And as the digital transition continues, we’re seeing some statistics that suggest increasing digital sales are compensating for the decline in print sales–but other stats suggesting they aren’t. Combined, those factors–plus McQuivey’s point that the digital transition is hard work–may be weighing on respondents’ minds. An 82-percent “general” optimism rate is still pretty good, but it’s surprising to see how pessimistic publishers are about the companies where they actually work, and how much more pessimistic they are than they were last year.

I can’t think of an obvious reason why respondents are less likely to believe that people will read more books as a result of the digital transition and look forward to getting some more info on that point. Update: Digital Book World covers a few reasons here.