The End of the Digital Beginning

For those of us looking at publishing-industry dynamics, what stands out is that authors are being talked about much more frequently than in the past in business settings, and they’re remarked on as players on the world publishing stage. But these references are generally in the context of self-publishing, which is the least quantifiable part of the book business.

In Berlin, the twelfth annual Publishers’ Forum program included the release of the Global Ebook Report from Forum director Rüdiger Wischenbart. This is one of the industry’s most widely read harvestings of info each year. And the 2016 edition carries a high view of where things may be in the digital disruption—with the message that we’re at “the end of the digital beginning.”

What’s worrying world publishers is that everything is slowing down. Declining print sales aren’t always being offset by digital uptake, and since 2013, Wischenbart reports, “Digital has shown hardly any further expansion, at least for the traditional publishing sector.” Are we hitting a wall?

Here is the single most worrisome comment heard at Publishers’ Forum, during a roundtable on discoverability: Random House Germany’s Annette Beetz said her company’s surveys show 4 percent of their regular, book-consuming audience walking away from books in the last year. They’re going to gaming, to film, to TV, and to other media enticements. Should even that rate of attrition continue on an annual basis, in a decade, 34 percent of that readership will have disappeared. And yet, publishing, as an industry, still can’t seem to come to terms with the need to actively cultivate new audience.

“In most of continental Europe,” Wischenbart writes, “ebooks have stalled even earlier [than in the US and UK], while the slide in physical sales was even more radical, particularly driven by the fallout of the economic crisis of 2008…. In most of the emerging economies, such as China, Brazil, India, or Russia, the broadly admired surge of book markets has slowed down (in China, for instance), or become flat (in Brazil), or even has been reversed for several years (in Russia).”

When you read this long (227-page) report, one of the most compelling points is that self-publishing as many of us know it in the States and the UK simply isn’t the same force in other markets. Wischenbart quotes Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch in estimating the US self-pub market at “$180 million or so,” or 11 percent of the overall US ebook market. In the UK market, Wischenbart cites Bookseller figures indicating that 12 percent of ebook sales may be in self-published work, rising to 20 percent in some genres.

Elsewhere, there appear to be mostly pockets of self-publishing success in some European markets from time to time. Wischenbart cites the top five Kindle sellers in France in 2013 being self-published, and he sees examples of new self-publishing platforms in the Netherlands (BraveNewBooks.nl) and Germany (neobooks.com, from the trade house Holtzbrinck).

We’ll leave you with one chart from the Wischenbart presentation, a global look at where spending on various consumer media formats are estimated to stand in relationship to each other, from 2013 and 2014. Consumer books, as you can see, make a very modest rise in this time, but are far below the apparent popularity of in-home video entertainment, although books do rise higher in user affections, it seems, than cinema.

Bottom line: The most solid groan was heard from Forum attendees on the issue of pricing. There is a pervasive fear in the industry almost everywhere that one effect of digital (either indie or trade) has been a kind of squandering of respect among reader-consumers for the value of a book. Low pricing as an incentive to buying now seems to be seen as nobody’s fault and everybody’s problem.