Penguin is to treble its investment in digital content in 2011 compared to 2010, as both Pearson and Bloomsbury cited a leap in digital sales as a key reason for growth in their interim full-year results, released last week.
Penguin Group c.e.o. John Makinson said increased digital investment would be channelled into the creation of e-books, enhanced e-books and apps as well as staff training, with the company creating media suites in London and New York to record audiobooks and marketing material.
Makinson added that e-book market growth was largely driven by the launch of new devices, and that Penguin's adoption of the agency model in the UK in November had not had an impact on e-book sales.
He said: "When you look at the growth it is what we call catalytic. The markets trundles along, the IPad 2 will come out, the market will spike, as people buy content for their new device and then it flattens out. There has certainly not been any evidence that the increase, as Amazon would have it, of prices under the agency model, relative to the £9.99 standard that Amazon applied, has slowed the rate of e-book adoption, or, to put it another way, there is very little evidence that the e-book consumer is enormously price sensitive."
He added: "As we move to the agency model, there has not been a conspicuous acceleration or deceleration as a result of that shift, the changes are happening for other reasons."
Penguin UK c.e.o. Tom Weldon predicted that e-books would make up 4% of Penguin's sales in 2011, up from 1% on average in 2010, though e-book sales of some backlist titles comprised up to 10% of their total sales in 2010. Dorling Kindersley, headed by publisher and c.e.o. Peter Field, will launch its first non-travel e-book in July, The Human Body. Field said that though currently the proportion of DK's sales coming through digital products was "very small", digital was "very important" to the company. He said: "A lot of DK's digital work is still building, a lot of it is about experimentation."
Speaking after the release of Bloomsbury's results, founder and chief executive Nigel Newton said Bloomsbury's bestselling e-books worldwide were Man Booker winner The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, selling 42,429 copies, followed by Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (28,252 copies) and international hit Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (26,434 copies). Bloomsbury's interim results for the 12 months to 31st December 2010 reported that e-book sales were running at just under 10% of trade print sales. Bloomsbury Group's e-book sales jumped to $2.3m (£1.4m) in 2010, from $131,000 in 2009.
The statement accompanying Pearson's results said Penguin's results in 2011 were expected to be “in line with the overall consumer publishing industry this year”.
Commenting on this, Pearson chief finance officer Robin Freestone said: “E-book sales are going up and the retail environment is getting tougher. Between the balance of those two forces, it is hard to see where the market will end up.”
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