Turning the pixelated page

By R.J., A.E.S. and G.S.

EVERY year the Frankfurt Book Fair, which opened yesterday in Germany, is proof of the scale of the publishing business. Some 275,000 visitors from around the world, including editors, agents, journalists and publishing executives, attend. The gathering acts as a marketplace for buying and selling the rights to new books in different territories, as well as a showcase for trends in the publishing business. One of the most surprising is the degree to which the books business has stayed “analog”. E-books spread rapidly in 2007, after Amazon introduced its Kindle e-reading device, but the majority of book sales remain print, not digital. PwC, a consultancy, expects e-books to surpass sales of printed consumer books (not including professional and educational ones) by 2018 in the US and Britain.

E-books have done particularly well in categories that are considered more disposable and sold as mass-market paperbacks, namely romance, science fiction and thrillers. Whether e-books really surpass print ones in the US and Britain by 2018 remains to be seen. Print books have proven to be a remarkably good technology in their own right, as we explain in our essay this week (here). Other big book markets, including Germany, will continue to be slower to adopt e-books, clinging to the old-fashioned sort instead. The pixelated page never flips as quickly as pundits expect.