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The print market in 2017 has been described as “meh”—solid but unspectacular—and the digital market seemed to follow a similar trajectory last year. Like print, which increased in value by 0.1% year on year and therefore can claim to have spent a third consecutive year in growth, the combined digital volume of the Big Five publishers stood at 46.2 million units in 2017, up 1.2% against 2016. It ended a three-year run of decline for the sector.
Every single one of The Bookseller’s 2017 Monthly E-Book Ranking number ones came from Penguin Random House, yet the publisher declined year on year by 2.9%, to 11.9 million e-books sold. While the TV tie-in edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, series follow-ups from behemoths Dan Brown and E L James, and the irrepressible Lee Child all performed strongly in 2017, they were no match for Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and Jojo Moyes’ love-and-Dignitas duology Me Before You and After You: that trio racked up 21 weeks at number one between them in 2016. (Moyes’ duology became a trilogy last week, and judging by Still Me’s first-week sales in print, the fiction author’s return to the charts can only help boost her publisher’s digital returns).
Pan Macmillan saw a similar dampening in sales, dropping a marginal 0.3% year on year. However, with the publisher posting a 10.5% decline in print volume year-on-year (the result of a Joe Wicks-shaped vacuum), the digital share of its overall sales increased, to 28%. That figure is is nearly 2% up on 2016. PRH—which has the lowest digital share of total sales across the Big Five—ticked up just half a percentage point: e-books accounted for 20% of its business in 2017.
In contrast, both Hachette and Simon & Schuster saw double-digit increases, with S&S leaping 12.2% to 2.7 million and Hachette jumping 20.5% to 17 million. Both totals are the best on record (The Bookseller began charting digital sales of the Big Five in 2012). Hachette’s 17 million figure does not include Bookouture’s sales, so its growth is likely down to savvy price positioning. It had previously set relatively high e-book prices, but in the past year or so Hachette has experimented with dynamic pricing, particularly with backlist and new writers. For example, at the time of writing Elle Croft’s The Guilty Wife (Orion) and Linda Green’s And Then it Happened (Quercus) are in the Kindle top 20, both priced at 99p.
Hachette’s digital share— 41% of 41.5 million total unit sales—was the highest among the Big Five in 2017, stealing HarperCollins’ crown. Though Hachette had a quieter year after a bombastic 2016, six of its biggest print hits in value terms were fiction titles, many of which—Clare Mackintosh’s I See You, John Grisham’s The Whistler, Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things and Jane Harper’s The Dry—made regular appearances in the Weekly E-Book Ranking. HarperCollins fell 18.1% year on year to 10.2 million e-books sold—although, given the publisher jumped 18.2% in 2016, this put it near-level with its 2015 volume of 10.6 million. However, 2017 was the first year since The Bookseller began recording digital volumes that HarperCollins’ declined—ironic, given that last year its print performance returned to growth after seven years of decline.
Estimating the market
What do these numbers mean for the digital market as a whole? If we assume the Big Five hold the same ratio of the e-book sector as they do the print market, based on TCM sales (55%), then we can extrapolate that ratio to estimate that around 84.03 million e-books were sold in 2017. However, much of the e-book market remains invisible to us; the self- published sector could be worth up to 40% of the entire sector.
The 84 million figure, though, would put 2017’s sales, across both formats, at 273.8 million. That’s a drop on 2016’s estimate (276.2 million), but the slight decline comes from print, rather than digital. In 2016, e-books’ share of the combined volume was a whisker under a third (29.4%), but last year it was a whisker over, at 30.6%.