New Zealand: Book sales down 15% but ebook sales "explode"

[GeoffR]

New Zealand Herald, 6th October 2013

According to industry experts:

* Book sales have dropped 15% in the last 6-9 months

* International publishers including Hachette are pulling out of the New Zealand market

* New Zealand ebook market has gone from nothing to US proportions in 12 months

[HarryT]

There appears to be some contradiction here. If eBook sales have "exploded", why are book sales down? Or are ebooks not included in the "book sales" figure?

[GeoffR]

Its not clear whether they are including ebook sales in the 15% drop in book sales, but even if they are then it is still possible to have a very large increase in ebook sales even while overall sales including ebooks are dropping.

I have no idea how many books are sold in New Zealand, but imagine the figures were:

pbook sales: 4 million, dropping to 3 million.
ebook sales: 10 thousand increasing to 410 thousand.

Then the total book sales (pbook and ebook) would have dropped 15%, pbook sales dropped 25%, and ebook sales increased (exploded :-) 4000%.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

ebook sales: 10 thousand increasing to 410 thousand.

And how much did you contribute to that?

[Lynx-lynx]

RYep, I've wondered if the paperbook sales went down because Geoff makes regular 'visitations' to countries that have ebook sales and lots of voucher deals

[Indigo121]

New Zealand book sales are based on local stores. eReader owners buy their books online, therefore not adding to local sales figures.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by davidfor

And how much did you contribute to that?

Probably more than my fair share

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

RYep, I've wondered if the paperbook sales went down because Geoff makes regular 'visitations' to countries that have ebook sales and lots of voucher deals

Not that I bought a lot of new paper books, but most of those I did I bought from overseas retailers, mainly because of the better selection rather then lower price (although paper books are very expensive here compared to US or UK, postage from those countries is also a big cost, often more than the price of the book itself). If I went to a local bookshop I would have had to order the book in, and it was usually quicker and easier to buy it online from a US or UK retailer.

I buy some ebooks outside of my geographically restricted area, but a much higher proportion of my ebook purchases would be counted as New Zealand sales than were my paper book purchases.

As the article says, New Zealand seems to be going through a similar phase that the UK and US went through five years ago, but I wonder if high postage costs for paper books (especially compared to the US where free postage seems to be the norm) will make ebooks even more attractive here than in those countries.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by Indigo121

New Zealand book sales are based on local stores. eReader owners buy their books online, therefore not adding to local sales figures.

I don't know how the industry sales figure are collected, but each publisher would get information, at least from the big retailers like Amazon and Kobo, about which country their ebooks were sold to.

After all, publishers are able to set different prices in different countries and geographically restrict which books are available for sale in which countries at these retailers, so they must know which countries their book sales are being attributed to.

Edit: Also local bookshops like Whitcoulls and Paper Plus sell ebooks on their websites, or at least provide a portal into the Kobo site, so I assume they would include those sales in their sales figures.

[greenasterisk]

That is the sound of inevitability.

[rjcroy]

Paperback fiction books are significantly more expensive in New Zealand compared to the US and UK, and Japan. So buying ebooks is a money saver, if you exclude the cost of all the tech you buy to read them For this reason I think ebooks sales will continue to grow in NZ.

For the first time can remember, the last two epubs I bought from the Whitcoulls website (Kobostore based) have been cheaper than the same epub on the kobobooks.com.

[HarryT]

How much does a typical paperback cost in NZ?

[rjcroy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

How much does a typical paperback cost in NZ?

Around NZD 30, which is about USD 25.

I could buy the same paperbacks from theBookDepository.co.uk for about NZD 9 and they would ship it to NZ for free.

[HarryT]

Thank you. That is expensive. The standard "bookshop" price of a paperback in the UK is around £7.99, which is about NZ$15, so you're paying about double what we are.