Three bad trends for ebooks.
Will the main device for reading content, and therefore also ebooks, be the smartphone? Likely. Three ongoing trends seem to tell us this thing that doesn't bode well for ebooks. The first is the abrupt interruption of the exponential growth of ebooks which in 2013 stood at a sober +5% coming from +159% in 2011 and +28% in 2012. A tumble that could be attributed to various factors: the unrepeatable growth of previous years, the lack of real bestsellers and literary cases and so on. However, if we combine this data with the other two, we must begin to seriously consider the hypothesis of a more structural decline. Some market insiders are already mentioning this phenomenon as a fact.
The first of the two comes from Apple. The Cupertino-based company announced that the third quarter of 2014, while recording robust growth beyond forecasts in iPhone and Mac sales, saw the third consecutive decline in iPad sales. It is a -9,3% on the corresponding quarter of 2013. Apple or market problems? More of the second than the first.
Yes, there was an increase in sales of low-cost competing products (+11,3%), but Gartner had to revise downwards the forecasts for 2014 of the tablet market which will grow by an anemic +12,1 % compared to a solid +52% in 2013 over 2012. Gartner attributes this loss of market to so-called phablets and also to the reluctance of consumers to switch to new models offered each year by manufacturers.
We need the second data Pew Research Center: 32% of Americans consume content on smartphones, with women overtaking men in the time spent reading on these devices (they spend 6 times as much time on them as men). An almost certainty is confirmed: the reading public is overwhelmingly female. But there is another observation to make: humanity reads much more thanks to smartphones, on which it not only reads e-mails, twitter, or blog posts or Facebook and other social media, but also books, essays and articles "New Yorker" style.
Consumer preferences
It seems that readers have chosen just that smartphone as the reading device, preferring it to the tablet and perhaps also to the e-reader. That the Kindle is no longer that rocket launched into the sky can be inferred from Amazon's agitation in recent times, an agitation that has stunned many usually benign observers towards the Seattle giant. Amazon does not release Kindle data: Forbes estimates that since 2013, Kindle sales have been stagnant or declining compared to previous years. From 20,1 million Kindles and Kindle Fires sold in 2012, this would have risen to 19,7 in 2013. Amazon it therefore has a certain need to support the ecosystem of ebooks and has no scruples in pursuing this goal. Perhaps also in the general interest.
One wonders then whether the ebook market will become a niche market for the over 43s and for aficionados, as is happening with the newspaper market, or will it be able to renew itself to sit as a winner at the table of the dominant media in the new tailor-made digital scenario of millennials. In the latter, the space of reading as a cultural, recreational and educational activity seems to be increasingly eroded by media competing with the book form and more captivating or socializing such as video, games, interaction on social media.
The solution to this loss of the book's share lies primarily in the hands of creatives (writers and communicators) and also of those entrepreneurial subjects who have historically structured themselves around creatives to build the modern book industry: publishers, agents , distributors, booksellers and investors. Readers are already making their way which is very readable. The visual arts know how to renew themselves in a continuous cycle; why can't even the written word find new forms and ways of expressing itself? Gravitas is greater, but not totally immobilizing.
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