E-book market share worldwide 2013 and 2018
E-book market – additional information
Electronics and mobility influence every step of a consumer’s life, including media consumption as well. The book industry is no exception, which is reflected in the e-book usage being on the rise. The forecasted 13-percent growth in sales between 2013 and 2018 is also expected to result in revenue gains. Within the same period, sources predict revenues from e-book sales in the United States alone to increase by more than four billion U.S. dollars, reaching nearly 8.7 billion by the end of 2018.
At the beginning of 2016, daily e-book unit sales on Amazon amounted to approximately 520 thousand. Only 23 percent of them were published by the so called ‘big five’ – Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster. As the distribution data shows, the largest share – roughly 42 percent - was independently published. However, the bestseller market still seemed to be dominated by the ‘big five’. In fact, Penguin Random House was the leading e-book publisher in the first half of 2014, with 250 bestsellers released in that time.
Although certain sources point to a decline in the number of e-books sold over the past decade, it may attributed to the fact that more and more libraries offer e-books to their patrons. In 2015, 94 percent of surveyed public libraries in the United States reported having electronic books in their holdings. What is more, the majority of those libraries accessed between one to five thousand e-books, while 27 percent said they had access to more than 30 thousand.