Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

How big is the ebook market? Between 2012 and 2014 ebooks leapt 

from a 20% to a 33% market share. This growth should be borne in 

mind when considering the sluggishness of print sales. In 2015 this 

dipped to a 29% market share

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 followed by a further fall to 25% in 

2016

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. Nonetheless, by any stretch, from a standing start ebooks have 

grown fast – good news for anyone who worried no-one wanted to read 

books in the digital age. 

Yet it would be a mistake to think the ebook market simply mirrors print. 

In fact it is a very different market in two important ways, neither of 

which particularly benefits literary fiction, even if it is a boon to the book 

market as a whole. 

We ran a crawl of the top 100 books on Amazon in print and ebook 

versions on the 10 February 2016 and then again on 23 October 2017. 

Both crawls showed that leading ebooks are firstly much cheaper than 

print books, and secondly that ebooks are more skewed towards genre 

and commercial fiction. These conclusions are firmly supported by all 

available Nielsen BookScan data. The average selling price for a top 100 

print book was £5.66 in February 2016 and £6.15 in October 2017; the 

difference could suggest an increase in pricing or could be seasonal 

thanks to more expensive Christmas-gift titles starting to dominate 

the charts. For a top 100 ebook it was under half that figure at £2.55 in 

2016 and £2.43 in 2017. The average price of a top 10 book was £6.25 

and £2.85 in 2016, and £8.19 and £3.19 respectively (the ebook figures 

for 2017 are here skewed by the high-priced big name launches of Dan 

Brown and Philip Pullman’s latest books). The books claiming top spots 

were priced at £7.49/£0.99 in 2016 and £9/£0.98 in 2017. For ebooks, 

prices of below £1.99 or even £0.99 are routine; in mainstream print 

they are almost unheard of. Of the Kindle top 100 that day, 38 were 

priced at £1 or less in 2016 while 55 were at £1 or less in 2017. All of 

this has to be seen in the context of the fall in prices discussed earlier. 

Not only are the price of print books coming down, but the overall price 

of a book across formats will have come down even further, thanks to 

the low price of ebooks. 

The total market for books is hence, as we have seen, caught in a 

powerful deflationary cycle. 

The kind of books sold in ebook also differ from print. Nielsen BookScan 

estimate that for commercial fiction, nearly half of all books sold 

are now as ebooks. For literary fiction and non-fiction however, the 

percentage is much lower. Take the top 100. Of the Kindle charts the 

only literary books that were in the top 100 in February 2016 were 

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Emma Donoghue’s Room (which 

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http://www.thebookseller.com/news/e-book-market-share-down-slightly-2015 

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   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/14/ebook-sales-continue-to-fall-nielsen-survey-uk-book-sales

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