eBooks - Tipping Points and Milestones

Transcript

• 1. eBooks – tipping points and milestones
  Terry O’Brien,
  Deputy Librarian,
  WIT Libraries.
  IIUG Tralee June 2011
  
• 2. “Without a doubt,
  the eBook is practically the
  biggest thing that’s hit the
  publishing industry since
  the invention of movable type”(Philip Ruppel, CEO McGraw-Hill, 2011)
  “inexorable rise of the eBook”
  (CIBER, UCL)
  
• 3.
• 4. Increased fees
  Huge library cuts
  More for less
  Library supplier consolidation
  Reach of Amazon, Apple, Google
  The iPad and the App
  The Cloud
  Retail damage
  Context
  
• 5.
• 6. 10m digital album sales this year already
  iPad sold 3m units in first 80 days
  Netflix 23.6m subscribers
  Q1 2011 – DVD sales down 20%
  Downloading, subscription etc. up 33%
  Rise in social media, streaming services
  Access not ownership
  Kindle, Sony Reader and Nook can now all borrow from libraries
  Digital content surge
  
• 7. “Device that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish” (2008)
  eReaderis a game changer“paradigm shifting device”
  Sales of eBook and Kindle have reached a “tipping point” (Jeff Bezos, 2011)
  
• 8. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown, 2000)
  "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point“
  “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.“
  “It's a book about change … a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does”
  
• 9.
• 10.
• 11. More ‘e’ than ‘p’
  
• 12.
• 13.
• 14. Mainstream but not ubiquitous
  More than ½ “best-selling” eBooks are free, many cost $0.99, many are erotica
  Library books can now be downloaded (US)
  4% m-on-m increase in available titles
  What it means to read, new kinds of reading experiences
  NY Times (2010)
  “yes, people read but now its social”
  Lending clubs
  Suited to pure text - fiction, rather than eTextbooks, iPad might address this
  Amazon & Kindle
  
• 15.
• 16. Kindle
  
• 17. “Kindle eco-system expansion”
  eReaders “increase propensity to buy books and content .. due to convenience, cost, 24/7”
  Kindle revenues
  Kindle growth (Carris & Co. Analysts, 2011)
  
• 18. Amazon does not disclose metrics
  Sales relates to volume not revenue
  Includes Kindle books not read on Kindle devices
  Only 30% of Amazon book sales are in eBook across all categories
  Even free books get a receipt on Amazon, but are no longer counted in sales figures
  eBooks are cheaper for the consumer
  Kindle figures include sales of print books where no Kindle editions are available
  Amazon skepticism
  
• 19. Bloomsbury Publishers
  “demand is for digital delivery, rendering traditional relationships irrelevant”
  UK figures
  
• 20. Penguin eBook revenues up 182% this year, 6% of global revenues
  Hachette UK eBook sales quadrupled Q1 2011
  70% of digital sales were from academic and professional sales in 2010 but consumer drive has widened audiences
  UK Amazon store selling Kindle books at ratio
  2-1 hbks since 2011
  Bookseller (UK) by 2015 50% ‘parity then plateau’
  UK Publishers Association - £180m in 2010
  eBooks subject to VAT
  German market now at a tipping point
  UK figures – exponential growth
  
• 21. Association of American Publishers
  
• 22.
• 23.
• 24. ALA – ¾ public libraries offer eBooks
  5% of American adults own some form of eBook reader – Pew Internet estimates this will rise to 12% this summer
  eBooks fastest segment of borrowed items categories
  New York public library – highest circulating eBook library in USA - loans up 36%
  Most checkouts take place on weekends
  eReaders download more books than book buyers buy
  American Library Association
  
• 25. Most popular eBooks
  Romance, mystery, crime most popular genres
  Short, quick reads, part of series, read in succession, multiple buys
  Amazon customers buy 3.3 times as many books after buying a Kindle
  Seasonal buying patterns, post holiday loading
  Backlist purchasing and series purchasing popular
  Children’s print books remain very strong
  Men more likely to buy tablets, women more likely to buy eReaders (Forrester Research (2011)
  eBook trends
  
• 26. eBook trends that may change publishing?
  Bundled books
  Social reading
  eBook clubs
  e-first publishing
  Free e-readers – incentivisation
  Open access eBooks
  Monetization experiments – in book advertising, sponsored links etc.
  Enhanced eBooks coming and will only get better
  The device war is nearly over
  The $9.99 model won’t last
  Publishers will remain important despite self-publishing
  “Contextual upsell” a business model to watch
  Philip Ruppel, McGraw-Hill
  Michael Hyatt, Thomas Nelson
  
• 27. Digital Book World Conference predict eBooks will reach parity with print in 2014
  Goldman Sachs est. 13% of all book sales will be eBook format by 2015, representing over £3 billion
  Amazon share of eBook cake will fall by 50% over next 5 years as Google and Apple eat into market.
  “By 2017 eBook will be the default format for textbooks, scholarly books and reference works”
  Highwire Librarian survey (2009) –
  50% of all acquisitions will be eBook by 2015
  A mere 10% of new titles will be available in print alone by 2020 (BL)
  Next few years ...
  
• 28. Kindle iPad app has increased eBook sales
  The app - huge impact on digital literature
  Google Books – “reading unbound”
  mass digitization project
  British Library / Google project
  Apple iBooks
  Vertical Integration – Amazon opening a publishing division, controlling all parts of the chain
  eTextbooks yet to take off – delayed adoption
  Device convergence could shorten eReaders' lifespan
  Significant developments
  
• 29. “the next five years will see an explosion of the
  eReader textbook market, and in 10 years, the market will be driven by businesses going green in
  government, education, health and other sectors”
  Forrester Research
  
• 30. Demand drivers
  
• 31.
• 32. Age and gender important
  Undergrads and academic staff
  Appeals to digital consumers who prefer bite size chunks of information (CIBER)
  Men greater users, business students more likely to use
  eBooks are not read sequentially “dipping” for ‘use’ (specific) more than ‘read’ (cover to cover)
  Convenience factor
  Confusion about formats
  Log analysis shows power browsing, quick usage
  Skimming is endemic
  User behaviours in academic libraries
  
• 33. eBooks – academic libraries
  
• 34. “eTextbooks flunk early test” (2011)
  ‘2010 survey - students not warming to eBooks’
  “eBooks only an important research tool for 13% of 3,000 respondents”
  ‘students continue to prefer printed books to e-books’
  UCL 2011
  “students still refer print when it comes to using, reading, absorbing” (Roy,2009)
  “Why aren’t eBooks gaining more ground in academic libraries”
  (Slater, JWebLib, 2010)
  “Kindles yet to woo university users”
  “not knowing how or where to find big factor in lack of usage”
  “students .. unclear about structure and functionality of eBooks”(Berget, JAL, 2010)
  
• 35.
• 36. Some possibilities - where do we fit in?
  
• 37.
• 38. “A university (or an IoT ...)is just a group ofbuildings gathered around a library”Shelby FooteThank you!
  Terry O’Brien
  Deputy Librarian, WIT.
  www.wit.ie/library
  #witlibraries
  tpobrien@wit.ie