Over the course of the last calendar year a record number of publishers based in the United Kingdom are failing. This is primarily due to e-books utterly disrupting the marketplace from 2008 to 2014. Many publishers couldn’t adapt to the changing landscape and digitize their catalog of content. Falling print sales during this period has resulted in 128 different publishing companies going out of business from June 2014 to June 2015.
The amount of publishers in the United Kingdom going out of business has actually increased 58% from the year prior. One of the big reasons why so many have become insolvent is because e-Books require different marketing strategies and small publishers may not possess the expertise needed to succeed.
David Elliott, restructuring and insolvency partner at Moore Stephens, said: “The fall in the value of sales for physical books is larger than the growth of e-books, and this is a worrying trend for publishers that are still dependent on paper for their profits.”
Last year, according to data published by the Publishers Association, sales of physical books fell 5% to £2.7 billion, while e-book sales rose 11% to just £563 million with digital revenues growing to 35% of the overall total.
Recent statistics from Ofcom also found that at least 10% of all e-books in the UK were illegally downloaded.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
