eBooks - Tipping Points and Milestones

eBooks – tipping points and milestones
Terry O’Brien,
Deputy Librarian,
WIT Libraries.
IIUG Tralee June 2011

“Without a doubt,
the eBook is practically the
biggest thing that’s hit the
publishing industry since
the invention of movable type”(Philip Ruppel, CEO McGraw-Hill, 2011)
“inexorable rise of the eBook”
(CIBER, UCL)

Increased fees
Huge library cuts
More for less
Library supplier consolidation
Reach of Amazon, Apple, Google
The iPad and the App
The Cloud
Retail damage
Context

10m digital album sales this year already
iPad sold 3m units in first 80 days
Netflix 23.6m subscribers
Q1 2011 – DVD sales down 20%
Downloading, subscription etc. up 33%
Rise in social media, streaming services
Access not ownership
Kindle, Sony Reader and Nook can now all borrow from libraries
Digital content surge

“Device that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish” (2008)
eReaderis a game changer“paradigm shifting device”
Sales of eBook and Kindle have reached a “tipping point” (Jeff Bezos, 2011)

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown, 2000)
"the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point“
“Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.“
“It's a book about change … a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does”

More ‘e’ than ‘p’

Mainstream but not ubiquitous
More than ½ “best-selling” eBooks are free, many cost $0.99, many are erotica
Library books can now be downloaded (US)
4% m-on-m increase in available titles
What it means to read, new kinds of reading experiences
NY Times (2010)
“yes, people read but now its social”
Lending clubs
Suited to pure text - fiction, rather than eTextbooks, iPad might address this
Amazon & Kindle

Kindle

“Kindle eco-system expansion”
eReaders “increase propensity to buy books and content .. due to convenience, cost, 24/7”
Kindle revenues
Kindle growth (Carris & Co. Analysts, 2011)

Amazon does not disclose metrics
Sales relates to volume not revenue
Includes Kindle books not read on Kindle devices
Only 30% of Amazon book sales are in eBook across all categories
Even free books get a receipt on Amazon, but are no longer counted in sales figures
eBooks are cheaper for the consumer
Kindle figures include sales of print books where no Kindle editions are available
Amazon skepticism

Bloomsbury Publishers
“demand is for digital delivery, rendering traditional relationships irrelevant”
UK figures

Penguin eBook revenues up 182% this year, 6% of global revenues
Hachette UK eBook sales quadrupled Q1 2011
70% of digital sales were from academic and professional sales in 2010 but consumer drive has widened audiences
UK Amazon store selling Kindle books at ratio
2-1 hbks since 2011
Bookseller (UK) by 2015 50% ‘parity then plateau’
UK Publishers Association - £180m in 2010
eBooks subject to VAT
German market now at a tipping point
UK figures – exponential growth

Association of American Publishers

ALA – ¾ public libraries offer eBooks
5% of American adults own some form of eBook reader – Pew Internet estimates this will rise to 12% this summer
eBooks fastest segment of borrowed items categories
New York public library – highest circulating eBook library in USA - loans up 36%
Most checkouts take place on weekends
eReaders download more books than book buyers buy
American Library Association

Most popular eBooks
Romance, mystery, crime most popular genres
Short, quick reads, part of series, read in succession, multiple buys
Amazon customers buy 3.3 times as many books after buying a Kindle
Seasonal buying patterns, post holiday loading
Backlist purchasing and series purchasing popular
Children’s print books remain very strong
Men more likely to buy tablets, women more likely to buy eReaders (Forrester Research (2011)
eBook trends

eBook trends that may change publishing?
Bundled books
Social reading
eBook clubs
e-first publishing
Free e-readers – incentivisation
Open access eBooks
Monetization experiments – in book advertising, sponsored links etc.
Enhanced eBooks coming and will only get better
The device war is nearly over
The $9.99 model won’t last
Publishers will remain important despite self-publishing
“Contextual upsell” a business model to watch
Philip Ruppel, McGraw-Hill
Michael Hyatt, Thomas Nelson

Digital Book World Conference predict eBooks will reach parity with print in 2014
Goldman Sachs est. 13% of all book sales will be eBook format by 2015, representing over £3 billion
Amazon share of eBook cake will fall by 50% over next 5 years as Google and Apple eat into market.
“By 2017 eBook will be the default format for textbooks, scholarly books and reference works”
Highwire Librarian survey (2009) –
50% of all acquisitions will be eBook by 2015
A mere 10% of new titles will be available in print alone by 2020 (BL)
Next few years ...

Kindle iPad app has increased eBook sales
The app - huge impact on digital literature
Google Books – “reading unbound”
mass digitization project
British Library / Google project
Apple iBooks
Vertical Integration – Amazon opening a publishing division, controlling all parts of the chain
eTextbooks yet to take off – delayed adoption
Device convergence could shorten eReaders' lifespan
Significant developments

“the next five years will see an explosion of the
eReader textbook market, and in 10 years, the market will be driven by businesses going green in
government, education, health and other sectors”
Forrester Research

Demand drivers

Age and gender important
Undergrads and academic staff
Appeals to digital consumers who prefer bite size chunks of information (CIBER)
Men greater users, business students more likely to use
eBooks are not read sequentially “dipping” for ‘use’ (specific) more than ‘read’ (cover to cover)
Convenience factor
Confusion about formats
Log analysis shows power browsing, quick usage
Skimming is endemic
User behaviours in academic libraries

eBooks – academic libraries

“eTextbooks flunk early test” (2011)
‘2010 survey - students not warming to eBooks’
“eBooks only an important research tool for 13% of 3,000 respondents”
‘students continue to prefer printed books to e-books’
UCL 2011
“students still refer print when it comes to using, reading, absorbing” (Roy,2009)
“Why aren’t eBooks gaining more ground in academic libraries”
(Slater, JWebLib, 2010)
“Kindles yet to woo university users”
“not knowing how or where to find big factor in lack of usage”
“students .. unclear about structure and functionality of eBooks”(Berget, JAL, 2010)

Some possibilities - where do we fit in?

“A university (or an IoT ...)is just a group ofbuildings gathered around a library”Shelby FooteThank you!
Terry O’Brien
Deputy Librarian, WIT.
www.wit.ie/library
#witlibraries
tpobrien@wit.ie

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eBooks - Tipping Points and Milestones

by Terry O'Brien on Jul 05, 2011

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eBooks - Tipping Points and Milestones — Presentation Transcript