The Publishers Association (PA), UK, has published its annual report of 2010 sales figures across the UK book publishing industry which demonstrates that digital sales are accelerating across all sectors.
The PA Statistics Yearbook 2010 shows that total book sales in the UK amounted to £3.1billion in 2010. It also reports that total consumer digital sales (including consumer ebooks, downloads and audiobooks) showed the most rapid growth, having increased by 318 percent since 2009 from £4 million to £16 million. Combined digital sales increased by 38 percent on 2009 figures.
The digital publishing market is now 6 percent of the combined physical and digital sales of UK publishers. The overall size of the digital market stands at £180 million. Consumer digital sales of ebooks and downloads increased from 2 percent to 11 percent of all digital sales from 2009 to 2010.
Academic and professional publishing digital sales have doubled in the past 3 years.
Academic and professional sales amounted to 72 percent of all digital sales.
The Yearbook shows that while total book sales have increased by 2 percent in value terms to £3.1 billion over the past year, the volume of sales has fallen by 3 percent to 739 million units.
The PA's Yearbook is based on a number of surveys. These include the ongoing Publishers Association Sales Monitor (PASM) data collection scheme, based on data compiled from 250 publishers representing 77 percent share of total UK publisher sales; the annual PASM Digital Survey; and a one-off Benchmarking Exercise conducted in 2005, which compiled data from approximately 2,240 publishers, representing 100 percent share of total UK publisher sales.
The companies participating in the PA's Digital Survey account for over 70 percent of the physical book sales of all UK publishers. Taking into consideration the balance of participants in terms of category published, the PA is able to roughly calculate the total UK publishers sales of digital products in 2010 as £170 million -£180 million.
Digital sales were defined as including e-books, audiobook downloads, downloads of all/part of books, subscriptions/access to online book publications, and any other wholly digital material delivered online or via CD-ROM.
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