The Bookseller reported this morning that publishers are preparing for the first big UK e-book summer with a mix of excitement and anxiety as they look forward to strong digital sales but wait to see the effect on print numbers.
Miles Poynton, digital sales director for Faber, said: “It’s the first really major e-book summer and the potential sales and information it will provide is really exciting. It’s difficult to know what we should expect. Our digital sales are showing treble-digit growth on the same period for the year to date in 2010. The reasons for the dip in physical sales are quite complex and it’s not necessarily a see-saw from physical to e-books.”Yet another annymous sales director confirmed that he was expecting summer e-books to flourish at the expense of print. “The received wisdom is that it’s the mass market that will be affected—e-books and paperbacks,” he said. “But portability is an even bigger issue in the holiday period and it’s just as likely to hit the new hardbacks.”
Bloomsbury digital director Stephanie Duncan suggested there might be a later upswing for print books because of changing buying patterns. “We know post-Christmas is massive for digital, whereas it’s pre-Christmas for physical books,” she said. “The evidence in the US suggests there is a summer reading surge with people pre-filling their Kindles before going on holiday. But there are also suggestions that also leads to increased print sales because people are coming back and deciding to buy the print copy then, or because word of mouth from people who have read the e-books is spreading to people who prefer to read the physical books.”
All we can do is wait and see what the next few months will bring for the writing and publishing industries...
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