Stacked bar — Publisher revenue by format, 2010–2025

The stacked chart shows how publishers'' revenue in Meridia divided between print, e-books and audiobooks from 2010 to 2025.

Overall, total revenue grew only modestly — from about 7.6 to 9.7 billion dollars — but its composition shifted decisively: print declined steadily, e-books boomed and then stalled, and audiobooks rose from a rounding error to nearly a third of the business, the only format to grow in every interval.

Print remained the largest earner throughout, but its revenue slid from 7.1 to 5.0 billion, losing almost a third. E-books told a story of an early surge that faded: revenue leapt from 0.4 to 1.8 billion by 2015, then flatlined, finishing at 1.9 billion — barely above its level a decade earlier.

Audiobooks are the chart''s real headline. Worth just 0.1 billion in 2010, they doubled and redoubled — 0.4, then 1.3 — before reaching 2.8 billion in 2025, a twenty-eight-fold increase that saw them overtake e-books during the early 2020s. Indeed, since total revenue rose by roughly 2.1 billion over the period while audiobooks gained 2.7, the industry''s entire growth — and more — was carried by a format that scarcely existed in 2010.