Читать книгу Book Wars - John B. Thompson - Страница 17
Beyond the US
ОглавлениеSo 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 from 2015 on. The pattern is very similar to the US, though time-shifted to around a year later and plateauing at levels that are lower than those achieved in the US.
Table 1.9 UK ebook sales by category, 2008–2018
| Fiction£m | Non-fiction/ reference£m | Children’s£m | TOTAL FICTION PRINT+ DIGITAL£m | TOTAL NF/REF PRINT+DIGITAL£m | TOTAL CHILDREN’S PRINT+DIGITAL£m | Fictione/total% | NF/Refe/total% | Children’se/total% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 2.8 | 1.6 | 0.1 | 524.8 | 868.9 | 323.0 | 0.6 | 0.2 | 0.0 |
| 2009 | 7.6 | 1.8 | 0.5 | 568.9 | 781.7 | 333.7 | 1.3 | 0.2 | 0.1 |
| 2010 | 22.0 | 8.0 | 1.8 | 570.5 | 823.6 | 332.8 | 3.9 | 1.0 | 0.5 |
| 2011 | 85.0 | 25.0 | 9.0 | 576.7 | 807.6 | 315.9 | 14.7 | 3.1 | 2.8 |
| 2012 | 205.0 | 47.0 | 14.4 | 710.1 | 814.2 | 324.0 | 28.9 | 5.8 | 4.4 |
| 2013 | 233.0 | 64.0 | 18.5 | 632.7 | 817.0 | 316.3 | 36.8 | 7.8 | 5.8 |
| 2014 | 248.0 | 63.0 | 25.0 | 611.5 | 745.6 | 353.0 | 40.6 | 8.4 | 7.1 |
| 2015 | 249.0 | 63.0 | 19.0 | 616.1 | 817.9 | 317.8 | 40.4 | 7.7 | 6.0 |
| 2016 | 234.0 | 65.0 | 18.0 | 593.7 | 908.3 | 370.0 | 39.4 | 7.2 | 5.0 |
| 2017 | 220.0 | 69.0 | 18.0 | 605.9 | 946.7 | 358.7 | 36.3 | 7.3 | 5.0 |
| 2018 | 229.0 | 75.0 | 17.0 | 588.0 | 953.8 | 368.4 | 38.9 | 7.9 | 4.6 |
| Source: Publishers Association |
Figure 1.13 UK ebook sales as a percentage of total sales by category, 2008–2018
Beyond the US and the UK, the take-up of ebooks has been much more modest to date. It is difficult to gather accurate data which are strictly comparable to the data for the US and the UK, as the methods used for gathering data vary from one country to another. Rüdiger Wischenbart and his colleagues have produced what is probably the most thorough comparative analysis of ebook market trends, and their analysis is regularly updated in their annual Global eBook report.16 Table 1.10 summarizes some of their findings, showing ebooks as a percentage of the total trade market in five European countries. The findings of Wischenbart and his colleagues suggest that ebooks account for around 5% of trade sales in many European countries, although overall percentages of this kind conceal a great deal of variation between different kinds of books and between different publishing houses. As in the US and the UK, the highest percentages for ebook sales are found in general fiction and in genre fiction, such as romance, mystery, sci-fi and fantasy.
Table 1.10 Estimated ebook share of total trade revenue in selected European markets, 2016
| % of total trade market | |
|---|---|
| Germany | 4.6 |
| France | 3.1 |
| Italy | 4 |
| Spain | 6 |
| Netherlands | 6.6 |
| Source: Global eBook 2017 |
There is also some evidence to suggest that ebook growth is slowing down in some non-English markets and may be plateauing, though at significantly lower levels than in the US and the UK. Figure 1.14 shows ebooks as a percentage of total sales in the trade market in Germany between 2010 and 2016.17 This shows that ebooks took off in Germany after 2011, rising from less than 1% in 2011 to around 4% in 2013; ebooks then levelled off, rising to only 4.6% by 2016. Some publishers surveyed in 2013 by the German book trade association, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, reported higher ebook sales, closer to 10% of overall revenue, but in any case the figure remained well below the percentage reached in the US and the UK before ebook sales began to level off.18 By the end of 2015, all German trade publishers had found that ebook sales were largely flat.
Figure 1.14 Ebooks as a percentage of total trade sales in Germany, 2010–2016
Source: Börsenverein
Patterns in other parts of the world are difficult to compare, partly because the bases on which data is gathered may be different and partly because the infrastructures and markets are often very different. In Brazil, for example, digital sales probably accounted for around 3% of trade publishers’ revenue in 2016.19 For other large markets, such as India and China, it’s hard to get reliable and comparable data. Wischenbart and his colleagues estimate that ebook sales in India were less than 1% of total sales in 2015,20 and estimate that ebook sales for trade books in China were around 1% in 2014,21 though it’s impossible to know how accurate these estimates are. The most common reading devices in China are smartphones rather than dedicated reading devices, and China Mobile, one of two major telecom providers in China, owns the largest online mobile reading platform. With over 700 million smartphone users in China by 2018 and with the second-largest book market in the world after the US, the potential for the growth of digital reading in China is considerable, even if ebook sales to date have been modest.
This cursory glance at patterns in Europe and elsewhere highlights the enormous variability in the ways in which the digital revolution has affected the book publishing industry in different countries and regions of the world, and underscores the fact that one cannot generalize from the US experience. Indeed, so far from being the harbinger of future developments globally, the US experience may turn out to be the exception – we simply don’t know. For the extent to which ebooks replace traditional print-on-paper books depends not only on the type of book, but also on a host of factors such as the role of large corporations like Amazon and the extent to which they have invested, or might be willing to invest, in creating platforms and distribution systems; the availability of reading devices that are attractive and affordable for local populations; the availability of desirable content in appropriate languages and formats; the different pricing and taxation regimes that apply and, in particular, whether there is a fixed price regime that forbids or limits the discounting of books – this factor alone can make a huge difference to the attractiveness or otherwise of ebooks; and the role that governments, legislators and judicial authorities might play in regulating practices and adjudicating disputes – not to mention the cultural tastes, preferences and practices of readers, all of which may vary considerably from one country, region, culture and linguistic regime to another. There is no reason to assume that the digital revolution will disrupt the publishing industry in the same way everywhere, sweeping through it like a technological tsunami, and the evidence to date suggests that this is not what is happening. Rather than a single consistent pattern, we see enormous variability in levels of digital uptake in trade publishing, with the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK standing out as the two countries where ebooks have become a major revenue stream, but where the surge has now subsided, at least for the time being.
