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Saturday, 14 June 2014

The Digital Reader

Self-Published eBooks Accounted for Half of the Growth of the UK eBook Market in 2013

Posted: 14 Jun 2014 04:25 PM PDT

What’s bigger than a bread box but smaller than your average Hollywood starlet’s wedding? The self-pub share of the UK ebook market, that’s what.

Neilsen Book revealed earlier this week that sales of self-published ebooks in the UK grew by 79% in 2013, reaching an estimated 18 million units sold and totaling around £59 million. These sales represent but a tithe of Neilsen’s estimates for the overall UK ebook market (even in a year when print sales are down 10%), but they also account for a noticeable share of the £300 million that was spent on ebooks in the UK last year.

With book purchasing as a whole down 4% last year, the UK ebook market grew by 20%, or an estimated £50 million. Self-published ebooks accounted for around £26 million of that £50 million. In other words, indie authors are responsible for just over half of the growth in the UK ebook market in 2013.

From the Guardian:

According to the new statistics, self-published ebooks tend to be fiction, but they are growing fastest in children’s, and self-published ebooks tend to be bought by women: 37% of purchases were by females older than 45, 32% by younger women – this was the fastest-growing area – 20% by males older than 45, and 11% by younger males.

Self-published ebooks still only account for a tiny proportion of the overall market (5% of the 323 million units bought, and 3% of the £2.2 billion spent on books last year in the UK) but I would say that the relative size is less important than the point that self-published ebooks are still growing at a prodigious rate.

A 79% growth rate? Not counting the 2012 Hunger Games bubble, the US market hasn’t seen growth like that since 2011.

It’s a shame that there’s no similar public data on self-published ebooks in the US market; would anyone care to guess whether that data will show a similar growth rate in the US?

The Guardian

image by robbophotos

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