Last week a new science-fiction and fantasy title, A Dance With Dragons, sold 2,200 copies in hardback in Ireland. What’s more, it did so at over €20 per copy. An impressive result and a great boost for the booksellers who sold it.
In countries like the US and the UK though the same book sold huge numbers of hardback copies AND huge numbers of ebook editions, 170,000 print copies and 110,000 e-book copies1 on its first day of sales alone in the US according to its US Publisher, Random House. In the UK, the Bookseller reports that, ‘HarperCollins sold more than 10,000 e-books’ and ‘ 28,840 copies last week in bookshops.’2
You would imagine that with a perfect opportunity to increase the visibility of ebooks in Ireland and with a clear market for the ebook version, Irish booksellers would have been keen to exploit the interest. You’d be wrong. No Irish bookseller sold a single copy of the book in digital form.
In percentage terms those UK & US number are very impressive too, 28.9% for the US and 25.6% for the UK. If those figures were translated into Ireland you might imagine ebooks accounting for some 440 units3.
The truth is that Irish ebook sales are nowhere near that level, we’d be lucky if they were 5%. That’s less than 100 units sold in digital format. The point is that for a title where ebooks are a clearly important part of the sales mix, Irish readers, if they want to buy an ebook version, MUST purchase that ebook from a foreign retailer. Not one Irish bookseller was selling the ebook edition as of this morning.
Even allowing for a lower ebook price point (around €12-€15 for A Dance With Dragons) and even allowing for the much lower ebook market share in Ireland, Irish booksellers are allowing foreign retailers to suck up their market and potentially capture their ebook sales in the future too. Imagine if just one retailer HAD sold the ebook to Irish readers and promoted it to Irish digital readers. Even if it had only been 50 sales they could have increased their revenue by €500 or €600. Who, in this day and age, can sniff at that?
Easons, to its credit, has at least made an effort with ebooks. Its store offers 60% of the titles in the top ten last week, but not the bestseller. The ebook listings pages on the site are attractive and the prices not outrageous. However the company does not seem to be pushing ebooks with any degree of enthusiasm.
As for the independents, ebooks seem to not exist for them. Of course they might reply what CAN we do? You might start by looking at what Readings, a small independent chain in Australia, is doing on the book.ish platform.
Options do exist. Kobo Books has already called for partners to help it expand internationally. Barnes & Noble, although they have not spoken publicly about their desire to expand the Nook’s reach, must be thinking about how to reach foreign markets. Even Google offers a potential partnership with its ebook service (which was just revealed as the partner for JK Rowling’s Pottermore site).
It seems to me that the key is combining content, a reasonably priced device and a real commitment to digital publishing rather than just lip-service. That strategy has worked for Barnes & Noble when they realized the future was digital and it previously worked for Amazon.
As ebooks grow in Ireland, as they surely will, booksellers failure to embrace ebooks actively will result in more and more digital sales leaking from the Irish market towards UK and US retailers who actually do sell the ebooks people want. Once they start buying ebooks from foreign stores they are unlikely return to Irish retailers for them. If Irish booksellers don’t look for a way to get involved in ebook sales and quickly, they will lose physical sales and not even have a hope of replacing them. That would be bad for them, bad for readers who value Irish bookstores and bad for literary culture in Ireland.
~~~~
Notes
1 | http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/books/george-r-r-martins-dance-with-dragons-sells-well.html
2 | http://www.thebookseller.com/news/hc-hits-digital-martin-milestone.html
3 | Based on a 25% market share of 2200.
News
9 Comments
Pingback: The State of Independence « carlanders
There are so many unresolved issues with the retailing of ebooks that it seems foolish for a relatively small independent book store to commit to them at this stage. I was interested in your example of the Readings bookstore in Australia using the Booki.sh platform but they’re not selling the ebook of A Dance with Dragons. And I noticed Graham Swift’s new novel on their home page but when I tried to buy it I couldn’t as they can’t supply to this territory. I don’t know about you but I believe the point of the internet is to reach a global market.
To retail anything like a decent database of English language ebooks through a website – that is, the new and backlist titles of all major U.S. and U.K. publishers – a small independent bookseller has to use a platform such as Ingram’s, Overdrive or Gardner’s. Set-up costs are in the region of 10,000 euro, which is a major investment for a business model that still doesn’t quite know where it’s at. It’s still the case that I as a customer can buy an ebook from Amazon.com but not from Amazon.co.uk – how messed up is that?
If the majority of ebook sales are through Amazon, surely an independent retailer is just looking for the scraps from the rest? You mention Google, Kobo and Barnes and Noble as potential partners but really, where would a customer go if they were ordering from their iPad or Nook? I do believe a good independent could persuade their customers to buy their ebooks from that bookshop’s website – perhaps by offering a considered range in the way that Daunt Books do in their shops – but the cost of getting set up is prohibitive and the business too risky. The best they can hope to do is to sell ebooks on the shop floor by placing their customer’s order with Gardner’s, as they would for a physical book – but that’s not e-retailing.
Adrian,
All of those are totally valid responses and none of them would I quibble with. The reality that leaves one with though is that despite the obvious growth of ebooks, independents are going to be left out of the game. Surely that’s less even viable then an expensive investment? One of the cool things that the German platform Libreka does is link digital customers with the bookshop that directed them in the first place and then send a small portion of every subsequent purchase to the retailers. If there was an Irish platform that all indies used, maybe something like that might be workable.
I don’t know the solution, maybe I should have been more clear about that, but one way or the other NOT ACTING is becoming almost impossible.
Eoin
An Irish platform sounds good to me – so long as it had a .com domain that could sell around the world. I wonder how one would go about setting up such a platform?
Pingback: I Worte A Comment On IPN | Irish Booksellers Are Missing Out On Digital Sales | Irish Publishing News « Eoin Purcell's Blog
Pingback: I Wrote A Comment On IPN | Irish Booksellers Are Missing Out On Digital Sales | Irish Publishing News « Eoin Purcell's Blog
I agree that Irish Booksellers are letting the ebook revolution pass them by – more’s the pity. Yet when it comes to ebooks the geographical status of the bookseller is of no great concern. Ebooks sell in an international arena and limiting sales effort to a small national niche market does not make good sense. That said, there is opportunity for Irish booksellers to gain advantage from the increase in digital content. The beauty of digital content selling is that anyone, anywhere can step on board but time is running out to be in the winning vanguard.
Hi,
I was under the impression that because of the “agency model” foreign booksellers cannot sell ebooks in Ireland? Am I mistaken about this?
The Agency model wasn’t the issue though in the case you mention. Rather the issue was territorial rights and the extent to which Waterstone’s is granted such rights by publishers. Waterstone’s sells into Ireland and the UK, but no further, the same is true of other ebook retailers based in the UK, though I’m not certain that it pertains to ALL of them.
Amazon is selling ebooks to Irish readers through it’s US (.com) store (though some people get around that by using Amazon.co.uk accounts).
Kobo sells into Ireland but iBooks and Google do not.
Eoin