Consumer ebook sales in the UK increased by 366% last year helping to offset a decline in the market for printed books, according to new official figures.
Drawing its data from information provided by 250 publishers, the Publishers Association's Statistics Yearbook put the value of consumer ebook sales – fiction, non-fiction and children's digital titles – at £92m in 2011. This is a 366% increase on the previous year, the Publishers Association said, and consumer ebooks are now equivalent to 6% of consumer physical book sales by value.
But the strong digital sales come at the expense of print, the yearbook reveals: consumer print sales were down by about 7% in 2011 to £1.579bn. And last year's decline in print sales is continuing in 2012: £313.6m was spent on printed titles in the first quarter of this year, according to the Bookseller, the lowest first-quarter figure since 2003. Physical book sales in the first three months of 2012 were down 11%, or £39m, compared with the same period in 2011, the Bookseller says, with fiction down 18%, non-fiction down 9% and children's down 2%.
"The story of [2011] is a decline in physical sales almost being compensated for by a strong performance in digital," said Publishers Association chief executive Richard Mollet. "That said, physical books remain the format of choice for the vast majority of British readers, underlining the continued importance of a strong high street sector."
Combining print and digital, the Publishers Association says that in 2011 overall book sales were down 2% to £3.2bn. "For many years now publishers have invested in innovation in digital products and services and this is being reflected in the increasingly mixed economy for books in the UK," said Mollet. "However, online copyright infringement is increasingly making its presence felt for authors and publishers and that is why we continue to call on government and other stakeholders in the digital economy to work with us to do more to tackle it, and to ensure that the UK's ecommerce performance is as strong as it can possibly be."
