Digital Publishing in the UK

Peter Kilborn | 09/28/2009

This first post on digital publishing in the UK must inevitably be in the form of an overview of the current situation here. That’s not an easy thing to do, given that it is necessary to separate the hype from the reality.

So first, the hype. The UK book industry has undoubtedly joined the international obsession with e-books. All the major publishers have invested in digital asset management systems of more or less sophisticated kinds and done their deals with digitization and conversion houses. Some are experimenting with new workflows to assist in bringing digital products to market, while digitization of backlist titles continues apace. There is evidence everywhere of initiatives to exploit ‘the long tail’ as e-books or in print on demand programs.

The reality, however, is more sobering. There is little real evidence yet that a sustainable market for e-books exists. Published sales growth rates are impressive but start from such a low base as to be meaningless. Sales of e-readers are increasing but there is nothing to indicate that we have reached the much-touted ‘iPod moment’. Like you, we don’t have the Kindle - there is still, it seems, no suitable wireless network available to supply the download technology – and this puts us in a fundamentally different place as far as e-book exploitation is concerned from the US situation. Amazon is a powerful force in the UK marketplace, the dominant online bookseller by a substantial factor with around 15% of the total books market; and with an innovative product such as Kindle known to be in the wings, it is unsurprising that the attempts made by the land-based retail chains - Waterstone’s, WH Smith and Borders – to seize a commanding place in the market have lacked lustre, though Waterstone’s have made strenuous efforts to promote the Sony e-Reader.

The e-book revolution, then, is still waiting to happen, and it would be a rash prophet who would predict how things will develop and when: there’s no shortage of digitized content (but not nearly enough titles to make e-books a plausible substitution for the printed article), a supply chain still in the making, a lamentable lack of good metadata to enable discovery, no clear policies on pricing, no automatic granting of e-book rights by agents and authors - not even to mention the impact there may be on the trade in general from the outcome of the Google settlement.

This is well exemplified in a blog by Philip Jones on the Bookseller website on the day of the publication of the new Dan Brown. ‘I’d have thought,’ he writes, ‘ that the launch of the biggest book of year as an e-book on the same day as the printed edition might prove a useful test-case for the immediate future of digital reading here.’

On the previous day (14 September), he discovered that of the main e-book sites only WH Smith even provided a buying option, but refused to allow a download until the 16th, the day after publication. Borders seemed not to know anything about it. Even Waterstone’s did not make it available until well after publication day had begun; and when they did sent out mixed messages about price: ‘Having been coy about the e-book price for the past two weeks, Waterstone’s today lists it as expected at £9.49 [the recommended price is £18.99], the same price as the hardcover. Oddly though, it gives a list price of £11.86, so the offering is only a 20% discount.’

All these subjects will be featuring in future posts, I have no doubt.

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