Yale Unviersity Press’s Richard Fisher, writing on the Scholarly Kitchen in the first of a two-day post:
prior to 2020, no major publisher of academic monographs in the arts and social sciences was reporting print sales as less than 60% of the monographic whole, with the working norm at a ratio of perhaps 75% print to 25% electronic and even in 2020 no major imprint has yet tipped into majoritarian e-monograph sales globally, even if certain major library markets (including the North American and British) are moving in one direction only.
The persistence—an echo of the trade market—of print sales in academic publishing is an obstinate fact, but one at such head-scratching odds with the all-digital serials market, and with academic reading practices too, that it can’t long persist.
The whole post is worth reading. It’s a contemplative and fair overview of the recent debate on sales and acquisition costs in any OA monograph future.