Penguin Random House’s revenues for the first six months of 2016 declined 10.7 percent to $1.67 billion, the publisher’s parent company Bertelsmann reported today.
Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, outlined some of the reasons for the decline in a letter to employees. He attributed the decrease in revenues to a lack of “megasellers” that the company released in 2015 including The Girl on the Train and 50 Shades of Grey. Still, the publisher had 316 titles on The New York Times bestseller lists with 59 of them reaching No. 1 during the first half of the year.
While the publisher’s e-book revenues also declined as expected, Dohle revealed that overall digital sales were up thanks to an increase in audiobook downloads. Here is more from the letter:
What’s also gratifying is the strength and stability of our physical book sales. You will recall that we never bought in to the gloom and doom about the future of print. Instead we said that print would always be important, even as digital became more so. We made significant improvements in both, and the care we’ve taken with our physical supply chains, operations, and distribution centers is especially paying off now as consumer demand for physical remains robust.