'e-books plateauing because print more attractive'

23.09.14 | Lisa Campbell - The Bookseller

E-books sales are plateauing because customers find print books more attractive, booksellers were told at the Booksellers Association annual conference yesterday (22nd September).
The book sector’s transition to digital came late, in 2011, but the peak is already flattening out, Douglas McCabe, an analyst with Enders, told delegates at the Warwick University conference.

In 2013, e-books accounted for 20% of the market, but in 2014, they will only make up 23% and by 2016, this will only have risen to 26%, according to McCabe. This is because the e-book “isn't as attractive as the physical book, and not that much cheaper to make.”

“Digital dividend from e-books is more limited than first appears – printing and distribution is a large cost but not as significant as it is for newspapers,” he said.

E-book sales have also instigated a change in the make-up of the book market, because they are very genre-driven. The Kindle is like a “charity bookshop, filled with genre fiction that consumers want to read but don't want to keep,” McCabe said, revealing that in the last three years, children’s books sales have declined by 1%, while adult fiction has declined by 27%.

This is also partly due to companies like Tesco and Amazon “killing the midlist,” McCabe said. “Clearly the book sector has been through a lot of pain in the last 10 years. Supermarkets have been a part of that, Amazon is it fair to say, has been a big part of that. There are now only 1,000 independent bookshops and that is a big decline of 36% in that time. What Amazon and supermarkets are good at is selling bestsellers in huge volumes. So what is happening is that bestsellers are becoming bigger and bigger - they have become enormous. But the midlist is being killed. Books that require more discovery in a bookshop are suffering.”

The analyst said that bookshops' strengths lay in creating an attractive destination and browsing environment where books could be discovered and hand-sold. “Amazon does not sell books, it lists them," he commented. "It is an algorithm. It is good at selling the long tail, but not midlist books. What it aint is advertising and selling books in a clear way.”

McCabe added that 50% of Amazon purchases are planned, whereas only 3% were results of browsing and he reminded delegates that print was still “huge” in the UK in comparison to other countries in the world. “We still buy 0.5million books a day, seven million national daily newspapers and 2.5 million magazines,” McCabe said.

He added: “In the end, bookshops are all about theatre, it is about the smell, that is the stuff technology can’t disrupt.”