The Final Frontier

There's been talk—a lot of talk, mes auteurs—about the shift from print to digital media in the book publishing industry, both in a general sense and on this blog in particular. E-readers are becoming more ubiquitous every year; more and more books are consumed electronically; physical print runs are getting smaller and smaller.

However! It's important to remember that simply because something is the case in the United States doesn't mean it's necessarily true for the rest of the world. (I happen to believe civilization ends at the Hudson, but that's another story.)

The shift toward e-books isn't as pronounced in other English-speaking countries as it is in the United States, which is probably as much a function of platform/device availability/e-book rights as it is purely one of population size. For instance, e-book sales in the UK in 2010 were £180MM, or about $294MM; compare that to US 2010 e-book sales of $441.3MM.

US e-book sales were up $165% over the previous year, pushing their sales to 8% of the overall market (up from 3%); in the UK, the increase over 2009 sales was a much more modest 20%.

There is a word for this, folks, and it's spelled B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

Now, I have some theories about how e-books will come to parity with physical media in markets across different continents—and I can post about those eventually, if folks are interested—but the main point is that physical books aren't losing ground to electronic media as quickly or in the same ways as is occurring here in the United States. Even after we hit e-parity in the United States (my guess is 2013), there will still be a sizeable demand for English-language physical books overseas.

I do expect that, eventually, physical books will be left more or less to the bibliophiles. The fact that this may happen in a matter of years in the US, however, is no reason to believe it will happen as quickly or to the same extent elsewhere.