Bloomsbury, the listed publisher of Harry Potter, is on course to make around a quarter of its revenue from ebooks in 2011 following a 600pc uplift in like-for-like sales of digital titles in the first two months of this year. Katherine Rushton, The Telegraph, 14 Mar 2011
Richard Charkin, executive director, said: "If sales continue the way they have in January and February, which we would fully expect, they are going to be off the scale. If that is an indicator of future growth then we expect digital sales of Bloomsbury titles be as high as 25pc of sales. They could be even higher."
Bloomsbury, which reported £90.7m sales and £5.5m of pre-tax profits last year, would not reveal what proportion of profits ebook sales were likely to account for in 2011, but it is expected to be considerably higher than 25pc. Digital book margins are higher because there are no printing costs involved nor any extra costs incurred by over-estimating print runs or pulping books with errors in them. "The biggest saving is in cock-ups," Mr Charkin said.
Bloomsbury published just under 1,800 ebook titles last year, including Howard Jacobson's Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question, which in the US sold 42pc of copies in digital format in the first six months of publication.
The publisher's growth in ebook revenues has also been boosted by its Public Library Online initiative, which makes virtual "shelves" of ebooks available to public libraries on a subscription basis. Mr Charkin said ebook take-up was stronger among middle-aged readers than had been expected.
In January Amazon.com said it was selling more ebooks than paperbacks in the US for the first time, with 115 ebooks bought for every 100 paperbacks sold.
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