Today, I published a short piece of research for Enders Analysis on ebooks. As Enders is on a subscription model I can’t paste it here, but the summary bullets capture the flavour:
- Market data and industry anecdote point to an explosion in ebook sales in the US and UK in 2011. Leading consumer publishers are seeing ebook sales at 10-15 percent of total sales in January and February, driven by Christmas device sales.
- So far ebooks had been strongest in niches: romance, business books and frequent travellers. They have now moved into the mass market: few genres will be untouched.
- This shift brings with it a very different market structure, with Waterstones likely to shrink dramatically, technology companies with little stake in the health of publishing taking major roles and publishers faced with disintermediation and forced to build direct consumer relationships for the first time in their history.
- ...chart also illustrates, to me, the foolishness of spending all your time playing with apps and enhanced ebooks when those will only represent a tiny proportion of the publishing business. When cheap colour printing came in that didn’t mean all novels had to be in colour, and the availability of apps doesn’t mean everything has to be an app. The $50 coffee table book is not the publishing market, and the app that cost $500k to develop won’t be either.
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