Wischenbart / Coufal Global eBook 2016

A report on market trends and developments
2. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-903074-07-1
Verlag: Wischenbart Content und Consulting
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 228 Seiten

The 2016 edition of the Global eBook report, with more than 50 data driven original charts and tables, is the international industry reference on the evolution of ebook markets focuses on relevant key angles for an understanding of the current transformation of book publishing in a global perspective: Market close ups (print and digital) for the US, UK, Europe (notably France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands Spain, Sweden, and a detailed overview on Central and Eastern Europe), Plus analysis of selected emerging markets, notably Brazil, China, India and Russia; Summaries of key debates and driving forces (global players such as Amazon, statistical close ups on pricing, performance by genre, piracy, patterns of consumer habits, DRM, self publishing, et al.) We provide an overview of trends and developments, based on a unique set of data from a wide array of the best available sources, backed up by a thorough analysis of overall book publishing in the diverse international contexts. The 2016 edition of the Global eBook report particularly emphasizes how digital developments are embedded in the overall evolution of publishing markets, by providing context data as well as historical statistics to spot trends and developments over the past 3 to 7 years. Main driving forces and policy as well as legal debates shaping the current transformation of the international book business are identified and looked at in country and market comparisons.

Rüdiger Wischenbart is a publishing consultant based in Vienna, Austria, specializing in international and digital developments in the publishing and other cultural industries. He also researched and (co-) authored the Global Publishing Markets survey for the International Publishers Association (IPA), and the Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry. He serves as a Director for international affairs to BookExpo America, and a Director of Publishers' Forum, Berlin. Carlo Carrenho is a publishing consultant, trade journalist, and Digital Future Enthusiast, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is the founder of the Brazilian book online trade magazine PublishNews, and its Englishlanguage sister, PublishNews Brazil, and he is a council member at Digital Book World. Miha Kovac started his career in 1985-86 as Editor-in-Chief of Mladina, the only opposition paper in that time in Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, he moved to book publishing and became Editor-in-Chief of Mladinska knjiga, the biggest Slovene book publishing house. In 2000, he started to teach publishing at the University of Ljubljana, and has written extensively on publishing and on Slovenian politics. He holds a PhD in Library and Information Science. In 2010, he returned to book publishing as head of digital development at Mladinska knjiga. Vinutha Mallya is the Principal LineSpace Consulting, a publishing advisory based in Bangalore, India. She is contributing editor to Publishing Perspectives, a consulting editor to Mapin Publishing, and visiting faculty at the National Book Trust of India.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wischenbart, Rüdiger

Coufal, Julia

Weitere Mitwirkende

Carrenho, Carlo

Chen, Dayou

Celaya, Javier

Kong, Yanhong

Kovac, Miha

Malya, Vinutha

Coufal, Julia

Krenn, Jennifer

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents
Executive summary

Part 1: Publishing – print and digital – in the global context

Publishing in global context

Key trends across selected markets

Part 2: English language markets

Part 3: Europe

Part 4: Emerging Markets

Part 5: Key drivers

Key drivers and debates

The expansion of global and regional platforms: Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Tolino

Measuring ebook markets in Europe: Data snapshots, case studies and trending charts
The cost of ebooks, and the re-framing of book markets: Legal battles in the US; contradictory pricing
strategies in Europe

Piracy: Nuisance, threat or opportunity?

Self-publishing

Subscription platforms
DRM: Protected vs. free Outlook and projections

Part 6: eBook Yellow Pages

Leseproben

Key trends across selected international markets
A clear overall pattern is governing most publishing markets in North America and Europe: For several years, the market for print books, especially bookstore sales, have been declining - slowly in some markets, sharply in others -, while ebooks rose, yet at a very different pace by country. Recently, notably in the English language, the increase of digital market share has stalled, or even occasionally declined, while print seemed to rebound. What we see most importantly are significant patterns, and variations in different markets and territories, seemingly due to a complex mix of economic, cultural, and structural factors. In the following, we will attempt to provide an overview of these developments, and the shaping forces behind, for a broad selection of markets, in the Americas, Europe and Asia, with detailed breakdowns, and case studies, based on the data which we could collect from a large variety of sources. A note of caution
A data based analysis across publishing markets and borders of the evolution of book markets unavoidably confronts a challenging situation with regard to available data for most markets. Even worse, inconsistent measures and definitions of parameters prevail, so that the outcome must resemble a jigsaw puzzle, with many pieces missing, and others not fitting into the overall design. The following overview must therefore be regarded as only a rough attempt, like a working beta version, aiming at producing an incomplete map, together with the encouragement to readers to return critical feedback on possible errors. Decline in print, slowing growth in digital
In most of continental Europe, for the last several years, book markets went down. Some countries, with relatively robust overall economies, like Germany or France, saw a modest, yet nevertheless steady decline. In others, like Spain, or Italy (or Greece, where no reliable data are available), the crisis impacted on the book trade with full force, or, for the example of Sweden, a mix of highly specific local factors brought about the sharpest decline in decades.   In all these markets, digital change in trade (significantly in adult fiction) has only begun its transformation of trade book markets at this point, so that the loss in print has not been compensated by digital gains.
Digital growth could not nearly compensate the loss in print in any of these markets. Comparing ebook market share in European key markets 
In the non-English speaking countries, the market share of ebooks within the trade segment of the book market, is below 10%, ranging from as little as 1% in Sweden to around 4.9% in Germany, with growth showing signs of flattening out across the board.  However it must be strongly emphasized that these figures are hardly informative, as ebooks do absolutely not develop evenly across categories and market segments, but are primarily reaching consumers with titles of fiction (notably for the biggest bestsellers), genre fiction (like fantasy, or romance), and low priced self-published works.  For some countries at least, the penetration of ebooks is reflected in a second number, portraying market share among those publishers who are actively engaging with digital for consumers, which can reach levels of around 10%, as is the case for Germany (based on a round call to publishers by the trade association Börsenverein). Thirdly, anecdotal evidence has it that in the ebook top segments, like blockbuster fiction or romance, ebooks can account for 30 to 40% of sales, or even more - and so in some specific cases even in countries with a particularly low presence of ebooks, such as France.  To narrow down this gap of understanding, and develop a more realistic and meaningful representation of ebook market evolution in markets across continental Europe, we opted for new approaches in the current edition of this report. With the help of several ebook aggregators and distributors, we produced a series of much more specific snapshots, and trending charts, highlighting trends and developments by territory, by genre, as well as by price.  These new elements, which we consider to shed some truly innovative and meaningful light on what drives the digital segments of trade, or consumer books, can be found further in this report, in the section on "Key drivers and debates", notably in the chapters on measuring ebook markets, and on pricing strategies. Within book markets and market segments, again ebook revenues are not evenly distributed among publishers. On the contrary, available data strongly suggest that beneficiaries from ebooks sales are primarily the respective largest publishing groups, plus a few independent publishers specializing in digital exploitation (plus probably self-publishing, yet with no data available that would allow a direct comparison). Ebook revenue at the Big Five publishing groups
The Big Five publishing groups which are the predominant actors notably in English language markets have created a relevant market segment among themselves for the US and UK. Penguin Random House and Hachette, who have both a strong presence in their non-English home markets, in Germany and France, have in addition been successful in establishing strong digital positions in German and French ebook sales.  Ebook revenues at the Big Five publishing groups (Source: Company reports)   Penguin Random House Hachette
Livre Harper
Collins Macmillan Simon& Schuster    2015 2015 2015 2015 2015  Group revenues from publishing (million) €3,717 m €2,206 m $1667 m n.a. $780 m   Revenues from ebooks (in %)    9% 22%    25%   Revenues from ebooks (details, 2015) Audiobooks +27% 22% in US 26% in UK e-sales +11% 100,000 ebook titles         2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 Group revenues from publishing (million) €3,324 €2,004 $1,434   $778 Revenues from ebooks (in %) 20% 10.3% 22%   26% Revenues from ebooks (details, 2014) USA 30% (romance 50%)
GER 15%
SP 10%;
100m ebooks sold 26% in US;
31% in UK         2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 Group revenues from publishing (million) €2,655 €2,066 $1,369 €721 $809 Revenues from ebooks (in %) 20% 10.4% 23% 27% 27% Revenues from ebooks (details, 2013) 100m ebooks sold; -9% in volume from 2012) 30% in US;
27% in UK)       The relatively lower share of ebook revenue at Hachette results from the French domestic market's very limited ebook penetration thus far. Ebook revenues at independent publishers 
Unfortunately, only very few data on ebook sales are available from independent non-Anglo-Saxon markets.   Only Germany demonstrates a good example. Penguin Random House reportedly has 15% of its domestic German trade sales coming from ebooks, slightly higher than those in the main imprints of the Holtzbrinck group's Fischer, Rowohlt and Kiepenheuer & Witsch, at 12 to 14%, and Droemer Knaur closer to Random House. Bonnier's Ullstein sees 13.5% of its revenues coming from digital. And two independent houses with strong digital ambitions, Aufbau and Lübbe, report 16.5 and 13.5% respectively. Overall, these numbers show that ebook sales in those houses are all in a corridor ranging between 12 and 16%, which is clearly higher than the 10% reported from various publishers interviewed by Börsenverein in early 2014.   This perspective not only underlines, once again, how meaningless the low one-digit values of ebooks within all of trade sales are. It also clearly emphasizes that ebook sales have started to define a segment with its own specialized actors, and specific driving forces in a target audience that may become a distinct group, different from the print readership. Growing consolidation in European publishing 
All the transformation processes of recent years, which in the meantime have well reached also non-English language publishing markets, have heavily impacted on the retail landscape distinctly across continental Europe. Hardly a large book retail chain has remained untouched, and several had to either undergo severe restructuring (Fnac in France, or Thalia in Germany), or had to file for bankruptcy, yet struggling on for survival (like Weltbild in Germany), or even have disappeared as brands altogether (like Chapitre in France, or Polaris in the Netherlands, each chain being dismembered, with units sold off to become new independent bookstores).  Publishing, by comparison, so far has had not one real casualty. The largest trade houses in Germany, for instance,experienced losses of just around 1% in 2014, according to a new domestic ranking. (100 largest publishers in Germany, buchreport, 1 Apr...

Über Autor(innen)

Rüdiger Wischenbart is a publishing consultant based in Vienna, Austria, specializing in international and digital developments in the publishing and other cultural industries. He also researched and (co-) authored the Global Publishing Markets survey for the International Publishers Association (IPA), and the Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry. He serves as a Director for international affairs to BookExpo America, and a Director of Publishers' Forum, Berlin.

Carlo Carrenho is a publishing consultant, trade journalist, and Digital Future Enthusiast, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is the founder of the Brazilian book online trade magazine PublishNews, and its Englishlanguage sister, PublishNews Brazil, and he is a council member at Digital Book World.

Miha Kovac started his career in 1985-86 as Editor-in-Chief of Mladina, the only opposition paper in that time in Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, he moved to book publishing and became Editor-in-Chief of Mladinska knjiga, the biggest Slovene book publishing house. In 2000, he started to teach publishing at the University of Ljubljana, and has written extensively on publishing and on Slovenian politics. He holds a PhD in Library and Information Science. In 2010, he returned to book publishing as head of digital development at Mladinska knjiga.

Vinutha Mallya is the Principal LineSpace Consulting, a publishing advisory based in Bangalore, India. She is contributing editor to Publishing Perspectives, a consulting editor to Mapin Publishing, and visiting faculty at the National Book Trust of India.