The organisers of the Frankfurt Book Fair conducted a survey to find out how digitisation will influence the future of the publishing industry, and who will be the driving force behind it. More than 1,000 industry professionals from over 30 countries responded to the survey, issued via the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter.
According to the survey, China's digital influence in international publishing is expected to increase threefold over the next five years. Consumers and online retailers like Amazon and Google are believed to drive the digitisation process. The survey noted that e-content will overtake traditional books in sales by 2018. Online bookselling was named as the most important development of the past 60 years.
While digitisation continues to revolutionise all aspects of the book trade, this year, over 70 percent of respondents revealed that they feel ready for the digital challenge. The survey also reveals that current opinion is divided on the future of the e-books and digital content versus the printed word. Forty percent of respondents expect e-content to overtake traditional book sales as early as 2018, while a third predict that this will never happen.
The survey found that almost 60 percent of respondents do not currently use e-books and e-readers at all. Sixty-six percent of industry professionals still expect traditional books to dominate the market in five years time, with very few expecting e-books (7 percent) or e-readers (2 percent) to be the main sources of revenue by 2013. The industry predicted, however, that consumer attitudes would evolve - with over half thinking that Internet users will be more willing to pay for digital content in five years time than now.
While only 7 percent felt that publishers were leading the way as the driving force behind digitisation in the book industry, 22 percent said that consumers were pushing the move towards digitisation. Amazon (21 percent), Google (20 percent) and the telecommunications sector (13 percent) were not far behind. Only 2 percent felt that authors were driving this aspect of the industry, and governments lagged even further behind with only 1 percent.
While 70 percent of respondents felt ready for the digital challenge, industry professionals nevertheless recognised the need to work together to tackle certain issues. The top concerns that will be discussed at length during this year's Frankfurt Book Fair include copyright; digital rights management; standard format (such as epub); and retail price maintenance.
In the 60th anniversary year of the Frankfurt Book Fair, industry professionals were asked to look back over the major developments in the past six decades. While 39 percent cited online bookselling as the most important development in publishing in the past 60 years, other main developments identified were marketing (20 percent), book fairs (15 percent) and chain store bookselling (17 percent). The survey also looked at how digitisation might shape the future of publishing, and whether some of the main components of the industry would still be around in 60 years time.
