Print of course remains king, although bricks & mortar booksellers face existential challenges as 2021 unfolds, with no sign of the pandemic abating. But the idea that audiobooks are capturing the ebook market and relegating the digital text format to history is clearly just not true.

US print sales had their best year since 2010, rising 8.2% according to the latest Nielsen BookScan figures. Proof positive that screen fatigue, Netflix and the lack of that all important “book smell” has finally killed off digital books.

No, hold on. Digital book sales had their best year ever too, despite so many people being stuck at home staring at screens and watching Netflix 24/7. So much for screen fatigue.

We won’t of course know the full numbers for ebooks at any time, as Nielsen only tracks a portion of mainstream publishers, while small presses, indie authors and APub don’t share data in any meaningful way.

OverDrive, on the other hand, does, and we now know OverDrive’s total global digital downloads in 2020 jumped 33% from 366 million in 2019 to 430 million last year.

More impressive still, 102 library systems saw over one million downloads each, with the bigger players reporting even stronger public interest.

For the first time two US libraries surpassed 7 million downloads each, while Canada’s Toronto Library exceeded 8 million.

Canada, the US and Singapore led the way – Singapore saw a staggering 6 million downloads from a population of 5.8 million people – with Australia and New Zealand libraries also seeing 1 million or more downloads.

As we all know, ebooks are history and it is only audiobooks keeping the digital flag flying, so perhaps OverDrive mis-typed its audiobook and ebook numbers. Or then again perhaps the narrative that ebooks are yesterday’s format is more wishful thinking by Old School Publishing than reality.

Here’s how the OverDrive 2020 download numbers panned out:

Audiobook downloads were up 20% on 2019, to an impressive 138 million.

Well, that’s it then. Ebooks are dead – you know, screen fatigue and all that – and audiobooks are the only digital format that matters.

No, hold on.

Ebook downloads were up 40%, to 289 million.

And it seems many more consumers were waiting to be screen-fatigued but just were on the hold/wait list.

How many more? Try 187 million.

Or to put it another way, if library consumers had been able to borrow all the books they wanted, total digital downloads in 2020 would have been 617 million.

We might add one further take away from the OverDrive numbers this time around, in mind the constant assertions that audiobooks are more popular than ebooks.

Because the thing with libraries is that while publishers get paid by the library, consumers usually don’t pay anything at the point of download.

So by removing the price friction from audiobooks, which tend to be rather expensive to buy, we might reasonable expect audiobook downloads to soar above ebooks. But that just isn’t happening.

Print of course remains king, although bricks & mortar booksellers face existential challenges as 2021 unfolds, with no sign of the pandemic abating. But the idea that audiobooks are capturing the ebook market and relegating the digital text format to history is clearly just not true.

And nothing in the final 2020 numbers now emerging is likely to change that.

The OverDrive press release also tells us OverDrive starts 2021 with 65,000 consumer points (schools and libraries) in 84 countries.