Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Light reading

In the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport people are reading. There’s nothing particularly unusual about the scene – we read all the time, on buses, trains and planes. What stands out here is that many of these readers are glued not to tatty paperbacks or glossy hardbacks or even those large format airport specials but e-books.
It’s all part of what is being dubbed the “Kindle Summer” – the first summer when e-books have sold strongly, marking a turning point for publishing. And if you’ve recently packed for a beach holiday, as I did last week, you’ll understand the benefits. Why take a stack of heavy hardbacks that eat into your precious luggage allowance when you can take an e-reader stocked with thousands of books? Gone is that mad rush at the airport bookshop as you try to find something you might want to read; and gone is the suitcase crammed with hardbacks packed “just in case”.

In April, the Association of American Publishers announced that for the first time e-books had outsold all other traditional formats; and since the beginning of April, Amazon.co.uk customers have been purchasing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than two to one. “E-book sales are rising, and rising faster than previously predicted, led in the most part by the Kindle,” says Philip Jones, deputy editor of the Bookseller. “Penguin reported in July that its global e-book sales in the first half were up at 14 per cent, while in the UK it agreed with the general consensus that e-books now make up about 6 per cent of their trade/consumer business. We expect e-books to be at about 10 per cent by the end of the year.”
So what does this all mean? Are we reading more? Are e-books taking over from physical books? Are hardbacks about to go the way of vinyl? And where does it leave readers, writers and publishers?
There are now several major platforms for e-books. Amazon’s Kindle is the market leader, but Apple’s iBooks, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Waterstones and retailers such as Kobo have all expanded the horizons of e-books in the past couple of years. Although each platform has its own unique feel, what are selling particularly well across all devices are thrillers, misery memoirs and blockbusting popular fiction.

Full piece at Financial Times.

No comments: