Print or digital? What the data says about the hybrid academic book
The digital revolution was declared twenty years ago; university presses still earn most of their revenue from print. The data points to a hybrid reality, not a binary.
Every few years the same headline comes back around: “The printed book is dying.” And every year, the year-end figures issue the same correction: it isn’t.
In academic publishing the picture is even sharper. Ithaka S+R’s study of university presses found that 70–90% of monograph revenue still comes from print sales, with digital’s share sitting in the 10–30% band. The big picture in Türkiye looks much the same: according to figures from YAYFED, the Turkish publishers’ federation that tracks banderole issuance (the banderole being the mandatory anti-piracy hologram sticker for books in Türkiye), over 413 million books were produced in 2024; audiobooks and ebooks are growing fast, but their share of the total market, as reported by the Turkish Publishers Association, is still under one percent.
So the question is not “which one wins?” The right question: “How do we run both, so that each feeds the other?”
Digital’s strength is not sales — it is reach
The real role of digital publishing in academia lies where sales figures cannot measure: access and visibility. A PDF reachable in a second from the other side of the world means citations and impact. University presses are living this too: according to the AUPresses open-access survey, 70% of presses have published open-access books — yet those titles make up less than 5% of new monograph output. Everyone is experimenting; nobody is at scale.
Put those two data points side by side and a smart strategy emerges: use digital for visibility and print as the revenue engine. Let the digital edition be open or affordable, let it be discovered; let the library, the researcher, and the curious reader who discovered it buy the print edition. Contrary to the fear that “open access kills print sales,” some presses report that an open digital edition works as a shop window for the printed book.
The operational bill of going hybrid
Sounds lovely — so why isn’t everyone doing it? Because a hybrid model, managed by hand, doubles the operational load:
- The print and digital editions of the same work carry separate ISBNs; mix the formats up and the catalog turns to sludge.
- Print has stock and shipping; digital has access rights — who, for how long, on how many devices?
- Pricing diverges: print at 240 TL, ebook at 90 TL, both as a bundle at 280 TL — constructions like these generate errors constantly on a hand-managed site.
- On the accounting side, the cost structure of a print sale (paper, printing) behaves nothing like digital’s; royalty calculations can split by format too.
Most presses that abandon the hybrid strategy are defeated not by the model but by this operational load.
Our approach was to hand that load over to the system. In Nasirus, the same work’s print edition, ebook, and bundle live under one roof, each with its own identity and its own price. In the store, the reader picks their format on a single page; whoever buys digital finds the book in their library, whoever buys print waits for the courier. The open-access-plus-print-sale hybrid product lives on that same page too — and accounting and royalties know the format difference on their own.
Who is buying? Three distinct behavior patterns
Rather than debating format strategy in the abstract, it is more instructive to look at how the academic book’s three main buyers actually behave.
Libraries are institutional buyers and increasingly prefer digital access — campus-wide access over a single copy, a license over shelf costs. But their budget processes demand invoices and formal purchase orders; an “add to cart, pay by card” flow does not fit the nature of library acquisitions. A store that can take institutional orders by bank transfer and issue formal invoices is a precondition for library sales.
Researchers are pragmatic: they go digital for the literature review and want the foundational work of their field in print. It is not at all rare for the same person to “try” a book as an ebook first and buy the print edition later — which is exactly where the logic of bundle pricing (print + digital) comes from.
Students are price-sensitive. For a textbook, an affordable e-edition is the only real competitor to the pirated PDF; an expensive textbook with no e-edition is effectively competing with the photocopier. Open access or low-priced digital grows reach in this audience without eating print sales as much as feared — because that audience was not buying print anyway.
The three patterns do not converge on a single strategy; their weights shift from work to work. This diversity is the most concrete proof that the format decision has to be made book by book.
A three-question compass for the decision
When setting format strategy for your own list, this trio earns its keep:
- What is the work’s lifespan? Textbooks and reference works are strong in print; fast-moving field surveys belong to digital.
- Who is the reader, and where? For an academic text chasing international citations, digital access is non-negotiable; for a work with local or collector value, print takes the lead.
- What is the institutional goal? If spreading knowledge comes first: open digital plus print for sale. If revenue: a tiered-price hybrid.
The answers change work by work — and that is precisely why the format decision is as much a catalog-management capability as it is a “press policy.” If your catalog cannot carry a different format configuration per work, the strategy discussion stays theoretical.
If you would like to see the store side of a hybrid catalog with your own books, book a demo — bring your best-selling title and your most-cited title as examples; odds are the ideal setup for the two is not the same.