Book Wars. John B. Thompson
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migrate from higher-priced ebooks published by traditional publishers to much cheaper ebooks self-published through Kindle and through other self-publishing platforms. We’ll return to these questions in due course.
Beyond the US
So far we’ve been looking at the patterns of ebook sales for trade publishing in the US, but the US case is somewhat exceptional: the uptake of ebook sales to date has been much stronger there than elsewhere. Among the markets outside of North America, the ebook sales patterns for the UK bear the closest resemblance to the US. This is not altogether surprising: the UK and US book markets share many similarities, the big trade publishers in both markets belong to the same large conglomerates, and Amazon is a major retailer in both the UK and the US. There was a time lag, however: ebook sales were minimal in the UK prior to 2010, and they only began to increase significantly from 2011 on. This delay can be partly explained by the fact that Amazon did not launch the Kindle in the UK until August 2010, almost three years after it had been released in the US. Both the Sony Reader and the iPad were already available in the UK by that time (the Sony Reader was launched in the UK in September 2008 and the iPad in May 2010), but the surge in ebook sales in the UK occurred only after the Kindle had been introduced.
So does this mean that the UK pattern of ebook sales is simply lagging behind the US pattern by a year or two and will eventually catch up? There were many who thought this, but the evidence doesn’t entirely support this thesis. Table 1.8 and figures 1.12a, 1.12b and 1.12c, based on data from Nielsen and the Publishers Association, show ebook sales as a percentage of total consumer book sales in the UK from 2008 to 2018.15 These figures show that the ebook surge in the UK followed a pattern that was very similar to the US: ebook sales rose quickly following the introduction of the Kindle in August 2010, jumping from £22 million in 2010 to £106 million in 2011 and £250 million in 2012, a growth rate of around 375% in 2011 and around 135% in 2012. Growth then quickly slowed down and ebook sales peaked at £312 million in 2014, after which they fell back, declining by 4% in 2015 and 7% in 2016 and 2017. As a percentage of total consumer book sales, ebooks accounted for 6.3% of total sales in the UK in 2011; this jumped to 13.5% in 2012 and then continued to rise until it reached 18.3% in 2014, after which it fell back to around 13% in 2017 and 2018. So, while the pattern is broadly similar to the US – an initial surge leading to a plateau and then a modest decline – there are two significant differences. First, there is the time lag: the take-off and plateauing in the UK were a year or two behind the US. In the US, ebooks took off in 2009–10 and reached their peak in 2012, where they remained until 2014, after which they began to decline; in the UK, ebooks took off in 2010–11 and peaked in 2014, after which they began to decline. The second difference is that, when ebook sales began to plateau, they did so at a lower level in the UK – they never reached the same high points that you see in the US. The UK figure plateaued at 18.3% in 2014 and then fell back to around 13% in 2017–18: this is well below the high point reached in the US, where ebook sales plateaued at 24.1% in 2014 before falling back to around 15% in 2017 and 2018.
Table 1.8 UK ebook revenue for trade books, 2008–2018
| Consumer total(£ millions) | Consumer ebook(£ millions) | Ebook% | Rate of growth | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 1717 | 0.7 | 0 | |
| 2009 | 1684 | 3.1 | 0 | 342.9 |
| 2010 | 1727 | 22.5 | 1.3 | 625.8 |
| 2011 | 1700 | 106.7 | 6.3 | 374.2 |
| 2012 | 1847 | 250 | 13.5 | 134.3 |
| 2013 | 1766 | 296 | 16.8 | 18.4 |
| 2014 | 1709 | 312 | 18.3 | 5.4 |
| 2015 | 1751 | 299 | 17.1 | –4.2 |
| 2016 | 1872 | 276 | 14.7 | –7.7 |
| 2017 | 1912 | 256 | 13.4 | –7.2 |
| 2018 | 1910 | 251 | 13.1 | –2 |
| Source: Publishers Association | ||||
Figure 1.12a UK ebook revenue for trade books, 2008–2018
Figure 1.12b Ebook revenue as a percentage of total trade sales in the UK
Figure 1.12c Ebook revenue and rate of growth of ebook sales in the UK
The PA data breaks out ebook sales by broad categories of books – for our purposes here, the relevant categories are fiction, nonfiction/reference and children’s books. Table 1.9 and Figure 1.13 show ebook sales as a proportion of total book sales, print plus digital, in each of these three categories. We see that the ebook surge went much further in the area of fiction: here, ebook sales account for just over 40% of total fiction sales in 2014 and 2015 before levelling off. In the nonfiction/reference category, ebook sales rose to 8.4% of total sales in 2014 and then fell back slightly after that. The lowest levels of ebook uptake are in the children’s category, where ebook sales accounted for 7.1% of total sales in 2014 and then fell back to 5% or less from 2016 on. In each of these broad categories, we see the classic S-curve, represented most clearly by fiction, as ebook sales rise rapidly between 2011 and 2013, peak in 2014 and then begin to level off