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The e-book market has begun to slow, with the post-Christmas peak in e-book sales less pronounced than in previous years. The value growth of the market has also been undercut by 20p e-books. If the trend persists it means the overall book market may decline in 2013, with first-quarter print sales down 5% year on year, and down a quarter since the high point of 2008.
The Bookseller this week publishes, for the first time, a quarterly Top 50 bestsellers chart with publisher-supplied e-book volume sales included. The data shows that titles that were price-promoted to 20p by Sony and Amazon took a massive slice of the market in the first quarter with Canongate’s Life of Pi selling 423,000 copies in e-book format, and Hesperus Press’ The Hundred-Year-Old Man... selling 353,000 copies digitally. In both cases, sales of the e-books far outstripped sales of the paperback versions, even though both titles feature in The Bookseller’s Official Top 50 for the 12 weeks to 23rd March on paperback sales alone. Faber’s Capital, which also featured as a 20p e-book towards the end of the 20p promotion, also saw strong e-book sales in comparison to its print book sales.
The biggest selling e-books outside of the 20p-promoted titles were Gone Girl, with UK e-book sales of 60,000 making up 26% of the title’s overall sales, and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, with e-book sales of 59,000 making up 28% of the book’s total. But again there is wide variance in the take-up of digital books compared with print titles. Despite taking second spot in the Top 50 with print sales of 199,000 copies, The Hairy Dieters sold just 10,000 copies in e-book format. The biggest-selling non-fiction e-book, identifiable from the top 50, was A Street Cat Named Bob, which shifted 18,000 copies, which represented 17% of its total sales.
Fiction e-book market
Even within the fiction market there are considerable variances: William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise sold 9,200 copies as an e-book, just 14% of its total sales, whereas sales of Fifty Shades of Grey across print and e-book were more closely matched, with digital accounting for 44% of overall sales.
For the first time publishers also supplied their top e-books for titles outside the Official Top 50. The data show that some titles outside of the chart are outperforming the bestsellers digitally. Lee Child’s Killing Floor, for example, sold 44,000 copies in the period, ahead of the more recent One Shot, which features in the overall chart.
Based on e-book sales data received from publishers and The Bookseller’s own analysis of the e-book market, supported by Nielsen/Kantar information, e-book sales in the first quarter totalled about 17 million units, equating to revenue sales of £50m. In unit terms, e-book sales accounted for just shy of 30% of all book sales in volume terms, and around 15% in revenue terms. This suggests that the e-book market will likely take a greater share of unit sales in 2013, but at a cost to the overall value.
First-quarter sales
The impact on first-quarter sales is more measurable. According to Nielsen BookScan, the number of print books sold in the first quarter declined by 3.4% to 39 million, but it can be estimated that with e-book sales included there was growth of 7%, with 55 million print and e-books sold. In value terms it means the print market was worth £276m, down 5.3% on last year, but flat year on year with e-book sales included, at £326m.
The Nielsen data looks at the market based on the price spent on each book by consumers, with The Bookseller’s own analyses of e-books using a comparable logic.
Looking at the same data based on publishers’ own sales would deliver a different perspective, since both Canongate and Hesperus Press would have earned more than £1m each in additional revenue from sales of the 20p e-books, with Amazon and Sony taking the hit on the discount. Sony pulled the 20p price promotion in March, but suggested that other offers might take its place, meaning that low priced e-books will continue to drive the wider e-book market.
Overall, an analysis of the first- quarter Nielsen data shows that the print book market is down 25% (£90m) on five years ago. Fiction volume sales were down just 1% year on year, thanks to the robust paperback market, with hardback fiction, crime and children’s sectors all down more markedly. Food & drink, erotica/romance, fitness and pop-psych were all print genres on the rise in the first quarter.
OFFICIAL UK TOP 50 (12 WEEKS ENDING 23/03/2013) | ||||||
Pos | Title | Author | Imprint | E-Book* | Print + E-book | |
1 | The Fast Diet | Spencer & Mosley | Short | 259,417 | 57,172 | N/A |
2 | The Hairy Dieters | Myers & King | Weidenfeld | 198,580 | 10,398 | 208,978 |
3 | Gone Girl | Flynn, Gillian | Phoenix | 171,340 | 60,119 | 231,459 |
4 | The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry | Joyce, Rachel | Black Swan | 150,269 | 59,446 | 209,715 |
5 | Horrid Henry's Guide to Perfect Parents | Simon, Francesca | Orion | 121,638 | N/A | 121,638 |
6 | Tom Gates: Best Book Day Ever (so Far) | Pichon, Liz | Scholastic | 111,747 | N/A | 111,747 |
7 | Kill Me If You Can | Patterson & Karp | Arrow | 104,335 | 19,098 | 123,433 |
8 | Alfie's Shop | Hughes, Shirley | Red Fox | 101,930 | N/A | 101,930 |
9 | Giraffes Can't Dance | Andreae, Giles | Orchard | 98,230 | N/A | 98,230 |
10 | Life of Pi | Martel, Yann | Canongate | 97,601 | 423,133 | 520,734 |
11 | Phantom | Nesbø, Jo | Vintage | 89,798 | 18,493 | 108,291 |
12 | Bittersweet | Cassidy, Cathy | Puffin | 89,744 | N/A | 89,744 |
13 | The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year | Townsend, Sue | Penguin | 88,475 | 28,243 | 116,718 |
14 | A Street Cat Named Bob | Bowen, James | Hodder | 87,082 | 18,321 | 105,403 |
15 | Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel | Kinney, Jeff | Puffin | 86,007 | 4,660 | 90,667 |
16 | Weird World of Wonders: Funny Inventions | Robinson, Tony | Macmillan | 85,053 | N/A | 85,053 |
17 | Watching the Dark | Robinson, Peter | Hodder | 83,247 | 9,806 | 93,053 |
18 | Jamie's 15-Minute Meals | Oliver, Jamie | Michael Joseph | 78,947 | N/A | 78,947 |
19 | Two of Diamonds | Horowitz, Anthony | Walker | 75,034 | N/A | 75,034 |
20 | Private: No. 1 Suspect | Patterson & Paetro | Arrow | 73,608 | 8,679 | 82,287 |
21 | The Fault in Our Stars | Green, John | Penguin | 71,795 | 13,052 | 84,847 |
22 | The Great Comic Relief Bake Off | - | BBC | 71,586 | 2,740 | 74,326 |
23 | The Soldier's Wife | Trollope, Joanna | Black Swan | 68,536 | 7,964 | 76,500 |
24 | No Child of Mine | Lewis, Susan | Arrow | 65,917 | 6,949 | 72,866 |
25 | The Hundred-Year-Old Man... | Jonasson, Jonas | Hesperus | 63,371 | 353,474 | 416,845 |
26 | The Hobbit | Tolkien, J R R | HarperCollins | 62,707 | N/S | N/A |
27 | Hang in There Bozo | Child, Lauren | HarperCollins | 61,940 | N/A | 61,940 |
28 | 11th Hour | Patterson & Paetro | Arrow | 60,330 | 10,085 | 70,415 |
29 | The Hypnotic Gastric Band | McKenna, Paul | Bantam Press | 60,270 | 697 | 60,967 |
30 | Recipe for Love | Fforde, Katie | Arrow | 59,319 | 7,122 | 66,441 |
31 | Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever | Kinney, Jeff | Puffin | 57,674 | 6,132 | 63,806 |
32 | One Shot | Child, Lee | Bantam | 55,945 | 18,726 | 74,671 |
33 | Waiting for Sunrise | Boyd, William | Bloomsbury | 54,828 | 9,253 | 64,081 |
34 | Capital | Lanchester, John | Faber | 54,185 | 54,253 | 108,438 |
35 | Did You Miss Me? | Rose, Karen | Headline | 53,920 | 13,622 | 67,542 |
36 | Eloise | Finnigan, Judy | Sphere | 53,663 | 10,124 | 63,787 |
37 | Shadows of the Workhouse | Worth, Jennifer | Phoenix | 53,598 | 5,920 | 59,518 |
38 | The 2-day Diet | Harvie & Howell | Vermilion | 49,790 | 6,617 | 56,407 |
39 | Devil's Gate | Cussler, Clive | Penguin | 48,219 | 2,717 | 50,936 |
40 | Fifty Shades of Grey | James, E L | Arrow | 48,031 | 38,372 | 86,403 |
41 | The Vanishing Point | McDermid, Val | Sphere | 45,462 | 3,975 | 49,437 |
42 | The Official Highway Code | - | TSO | 44,805 | N/S | N/A |
43 | Wolf Hall | Mantel, Hilary | Fourth Estate | 44,527 | N/S | N/A |
44 | Queenie | Wilson, Jacqueline | Doubleday | 44,461 | 3,678 | 48,139 |
45 | Reflected in You | Day, Sylvia | Penguin | 43,915 | 26,175 | 70,090 |
46 | Betrayal | Steel, Danielle | Corgi | 43,024 | 2,840 | 45,864 |
47 | Tuesday's Gone | French, Nicci | Penguin | 41,132 | 2,737 | 43,869 |
48 | Is it Just Me? | Hart, Miranda | Hodder & Stoughton | 40,842 | 13,332 | 54,174 |
49 | Fifty Shades Freed | James, E L | Arrow | 39,990 | 29,804 | 69,794 |
50 | The Stranger I Married | Day, Sylvia | Penguin | 39,631 | 7,374 | 47,005 |
*All e-book sales data was supplied by the publishers, and represent UK volume sales for the period to 23rd March, except for Faber’s figure for Capital, which includes export, and for Short Books’ The Fast Diet, where the e-book number is for January and February. N/S means publisher did not supply an e-book number; N/A means no equivalent e-book exists.