The sale of e-books from the Big Six publishers in the UK has come down by 8.3 percent in 2022, BooksandPublishing reported citing a report on Bookseller. In terms of volume, that turns out to be 43.6 million e-books that were sold last year. That made for the lowest sales registered since 2017 and the second lowest it has ever been since the Bookseller began collecting annual e-book sales data from the publishers.
That said, it isn’t a story of gloom all through. Bloomsbury did manage to register positive growth with sales growing 26 percent and is the only publisher to do so. HarperCollins reported its sales remained flat though the remaining four publishers reported a double-digit sales decline in 2022. Almost a third, or 28.4 percent to be precise of the total sales of publishers is contributed by e-books.
The sales decline is all the more glaring coming as it does in the backdrop of the huge sales boom recorded during the pandemic. E-Book sales of all six publishers peaked at 54.7 million units in 2020. Meanwhile, Hachette emerged as the biggest trade digital publisher in the UK in 2022. This makes for a remarkable feat considering that it has maintained the lead for 10 of the past 11 years.
Other publishers in descending order of sales volume include Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Bloomsbury.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.