In the United States, the leading country of the new economy, the ebook sales published by major publishers are slow down a lot in the first half of the 2013 compared to the same period of 2012. Worse: the second semester of 2013 started with a significant decline of the 3,6% and even the Christmas season seems to have confirmed these trends. To tell us is theAssociation of American Publishers (AAP) which collects the sales data of 1200 American publishers on a monthly basis. A similar trend detects it Nielsen in UK, the most important European ebook market.
The AAP data does not include sales of independent publishers and to the self-published for which we have no records, but we know to be a phenomenon anything but marginal. In rankings of sale of Amazon, 25 titles out of the 100 most popular are by independent publishers o self-published.
Orna Ross, director of the UK Alliance of Independent Authors, told al Guardian:
We are in the middle of a big change. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of bestsellers were self-published. I don't see who can stop them.
The author self-published Hugh howey, whose series Wool has become a case study, wrote in a tweet: “Indie authors represent a new great editor that joins the big six”.?CreateSpace, the Amazon branch that deals with publications on demand, is the most important client of Bowker, the agency that issues ISBNs in the USA: in 2012 it registered the beauty of 131.460 ISBNs. the ISBNs required by AAP publishers are barely double.
Is the ebook market really the prerogative of the new independent entities whose fuel is Amazon? Too early to jump to conclusions. Richard Mollet, CEO of the British Publishers Association, thinks the major publishers still offer authors a unparalleled creative support, financial and marketing skills helping them reach their fullest potential.
On the hardcovers
To do from during to the decline of ebooks is a trends to say the least paradoxical: the robust growth of hardcovers (hardcover novelties priced at $25 each) that seemed destined for the end of the dinosaurs after the meteorite fell to earth and instead the hardcover books are grown up to a 11% pace in the first half of 2013 if compared to the same period of 2012. In the month of August 2013 hardcovers recorded a +50%. In 2010, the overall sales of hardcovers had been outclassed by those of ebooks, but in the first half of 2013 the two sectors matched again: ebooks totaled 800 million dollars against 778,6 for hardcovers. The cheetah has been joined by the tortoise. There resurrection of hardcover books coupled with the stagnation of ebooks has thrown in confusion all those involved in this industry either because they work in it or because they talk about it.
David Carr, the NYTimes media columnist, commenting on a different story, signed a article of his column “The Media Equaition” entitled “For readers print can be the cool tool”. But is the book so cool again? Has the majority of readers returned with the old, reassuring girlfriend from their own country? It would seem so. Len Vlahos, director of Book Industry Study Book, the most important observatory of the US book market, declared that we have reached one state of balance: in 2010 the ebook market was a nascent market but today it appears as a mature market. The market share of ebook in the USA it is today of 25% with peaks over 50% for certain genres. Will it stop there to grow homeopathically? The NYTimes reports the opinion of an executive of Barnes & Nobles, the large bookstore chain is in very troubled waters, which said: "Anyone who wants to read books on an electronic device is already doing it." A plausible explanation, in any case the amazement for this arrest remains.
Bestseller beats long tail
What happened in 2013 in the ebook market? Easy: more than market saturation best-selling titles have been missing in the genres where the ebook is all the rage. We have learned to learn that they are just the blockbuster, the “bread & butter” of the digital media economy. There was none in 2013 no bestsellers remotely comparable to the erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker e Fifty shades of red in the adult fiction sector and not even a Hunger Games in that of children's literature. Only in Italy in 2012 the trilogy of EL James has sold, according to Mondadori data, over 3 million and a half of copies in volume (30 million in the US) and registered 130 thousand downloads in ebook edition (12,5 million in the USA), occupying first, third and fourth place in the ranking of best-selling books of the year in Italy. In 2012 according to "Publishers Weekly" more than a thousand titles exceeded 25 thousand downloads.
In 2013, according to Nielsen's Bookscan, the best-selling title in the US was the eighth installment in the children's series Diary of Wimpy Kid which has made 1,8 million copies, a text with beautiful illustrations that it is not suitable to be proposed in ebook so much that it didn't even enter the top 100 Kindle bestsellers of 2013. Inferno by Dan Brown, which follows in second place, has not repeated the success of its previous works even though it was the best-selling ebook on Amazon's Kindle store. The lack of a bestseller like the trilogy Hunger Games it was mainly seen in the boys sector where you had a collapse of 40% in ebook sales. Without planetary bestsellers, the publishing industry suffers a lot, as happens to cinema, video games and Pay TV.
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