On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway looks at the retro tech boom driving an unexpected CD revival — and what Gen Z's love of physical media means for print books. He then digs into a contested new study, cited by the AAP and Authors Guild, that links rising library e-lending to falling print sales, and reminds indie authors they set their own library pricing through OverDrive. He closes with an invitation to take Gotham Ghostwriters' second AI and Writing survey.
Listen to the Podcast: New Study Ties Library E-Lending to Falling Print Sales
Show Notes
About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and our own ALLi team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center.
Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, and welcome to another week's Self-Publishing News. And starting off this week with a very, very interesting story I came across not about books, but about music, and it fits very much with some of the trends we've been talking about here recently. And the headline — and this is from a piece from TechCrunch — said, “CD sales are making an unexpected comeback amid a retro tech boom.”
CD Sales Bounce Back in a Retro Tech Boom
So as someone who remembers CDs coming in and being the latest big thing, the idea that they are now a retro tech boom makes me feel my age. But CDs, it seems, are selling more than they have done in some time, and this very much feeds into the similar thing that we are seeing with print sales of books and the aesthetics across BookTok and book social media, where physical things are seen as desirable both as ways of consuming media and as, as I say, something that has a certain aesthetic kind of quality.
So looking at those figures, in the first half of 2026 we saw 17.5 million CDs sold, which is an increase of nearly half, so 45.7 percent, from the equivalent in 2025, which was 12 million units. So, the numbers aren't huge, but they are very much on the increase, and that was sort of unexpected.
So the article positions this as part of a wider increase. So it talks about dumb phones. It also talks about typewriters and vinyl, and it is very much saying that this is a trend that is being driven by Gen Z. So that fits with what we have talked about in this column in the past about BookTok and dark academia and this whole reading as aesthetic concept, and the fact that younger people are turning more to print books and to the whole culture of going out into the physical world, picking up a book, picking up merchandise along with the book, and reading a print copy of the book.
And you might say it also ties in with this sort of multimodal approach to reading that we've seen from things like Page Match, where even if someone is reading an audiobook, at some point they then switch when they want to kick back in the countryside or take a book into the bath.
They can find it easy to transition from reading an electronic copy of the book to reading a physical copy of the same book. So there is definitely a wider movement that is going on which is supporting physical media, and that means more opportunities for us as writers. It is also just part of what you might see as the healthy situation when it comes to people's desire to consume culture or be part of culture.
New Study Ties Library E-Lending to Falling Print Sales
And that brings us into the thorny topic of libraries. So libraries and publishers have had an uncomfortable relationship for several years now. At the center of that relationship is always the question of pricing. This goes back to the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, and the introduction of pricing systems that saw essentially the amount that libraries were paying for e-books increase as publishers looked to sort of decrease the amount of lends that could be made, so that libraries would pay either on a metered usage basis or they would buy licenses for books which ran out sooner after fewer lends.
And publishers have said that this is an essential thing to do because they, and indeed us as rights holders in those titles, rely on income from royalties, and we need to charge those prices in order to continue to make money when people are reading based on going to the library.
And we know that that is happening. We've seen this with surveys that have come out recently about whether or not people are paying for the books they're reading or the books they're listening to. And we've seen, I think it was around half or more of people who read books don't pay for those books, and that is something that was concerning publishers greatly and caused quite a lot of controversy. But one of the reasons why people are reading a lot, but not necessarily paying for what they read, is that they are borrowing from libraries.
So as that happens more, we are looking at ways of ensuring that authors still make what they need to make from those reads. And obviously, as indie authors, we have a certain amount of freedom in how we do this because we can price our books how we want through OverDrive. So libraries will go into OverDrive, they'll order copies from OverDrive, and we are able to set the price for libraries to pay for our titles, and we then receive a royalty accordingly.
So we can undercut publishers if we want to undercut publishers, or not if we want not to. But one of the things that has happened in the US is that there are a number of states who are looking to pass laws which would impose licensing terms on publishers, which means that libraries would have an automatic right to license e-books and audiobooks for a lower amount than publishers are looking currently to charge.
And that has been part of contributing to another rise in tensions between libraries and publishers. And all of that is the backdrop to a new survey, and this is being carried out by a group called Secretariat. It is basically looking at whether the number of library lends that you get for e-books and audiobooks is decreasing the number of sales.
So this is something that has been a matter of controversy for a long time. People are reading more through libraries. Does that mean they are actually buying less? And this survey has, again, caused quite a fuss because it is suggesting that that actually is the case. And the Association of American Publishers and Authors Guild have taken this as evidence that there is actually now a direct correlation between increased library lends of e-books and audiobooks and decreased sales. And they can even put a figure on it.
So the quotation from the report that is highlighted on the AAP's — that's the Association of American Publishers — press release about the issue is, “Consumer print sales decline by approximately 0.85 to 1% for every one percentage point increase in the share of e-books in public libraries.”
And it does say that adult fiction is at the upper end of this range. So therefore it's almost a one-to-one correlation. Not quite, but almost. That for every increase in the share of e-books being borrowed, there is a corresponding decrease in the amount of print sales being made.
So this is obviously an attempt to demonstrate to lawmakers that it would be a bad idea to force licensing agreements on publishers and libraries at a state level. Obviously, we don't know whether that's going to be a successful lobby or not, but it explicitly states that such attempts to make it easier for libraries to access e-books at lower prices would be a bad idea.
The study is called An Empirical Study of the Impact of Library E-lending on the Book Economy, and it suggests that it is actually detrimental to the amount of sales that are being made of print copies, and therefore the royalties that are available to authors and the money that is available to publishers from those sales, and that therefore wanting lower prices for library lends is going to lead to harm to publishers and writers.
So it is not without controversy. There have been a lot of people jumping on this and saying that it obviously has an agenda because of the way it is funded. On the other hand, the survey itself states that this is not an argument against library lending. It is rather an argument in favor of better funding to libraries so that they can then make the purchases they need at a higher price.
That obviously is an argument that is going to play out where legislative decisions are made, but it is probably a good point to end the story to remind indie authors that we are able to make our own decisions in this respect because we can set prices as we see fit. When we distribute through OverDrive, we can set the prices that libraries pay for our books.
We are not bound by what our publishers tell us because we are the publishers, and so we can decide whether we want to, at the moment, impose a higher price or make our books available for less to libraries for lending. And that feels like an appropriate juncture to leave that and just note in passing that there is a very interesting survey that is available that you can take part in.
Gotham Ghostwriters Opens Its Second AI and Writing Survey
It is the second AI and Writing survey. So, I will make sure that there is a link in the description of this podcast. It is by Gotham Ghostwriters, and it's basically asking what writers make of AI and AI usage in their industry. What makes it a valuable survey is that it is the second one, and second ones in series are always particularly interesting because they show trends, and trends are always particularly interesting with new developments.
So last time, for example, there was a really stark set of figures which showed a difference between people who used AI and people who didn't use AI — what the survey authors called an attitudinal divide between AI users and non-users. So 61 percent of the writers surveyed said they did use AI, and of those, 92 percent said it made them more productive, and 59 percent said they thought it made the quality of their writing better.
On the other hand, of those who didn't use AI, only 3 percent felt that AI was a positive force for the profession, to quote from the survey. So that really is about as stark as you can get. And it would be very interesting to see if some of those stark attitudinal divides have narrowed or whether they have hardened in the year since.
So if you have feelings on that, then please do take part in the survey. And I look forward to reporting on the results in due course. And with that, thank you very much as always.
