Book revenue: print vs. digital
Total publisher sales revenue of books, journals, and rights in the United Kingdom reached 6.7 billion British pounds in 2021, with physical revenue almost recovering to pre-pandemic levels. Digital revenue surpassed three billion GBP for the first time in 2021, coming close to matching print. Should this trend continue, digital revenue could overtake print in the next year or two.Print book alternatives are growing in popularity among UK consumers. Audiobook download sales revenue hit 151 million British pounds in 2021, a number more than twice the figure recorded in 2018. Additionally, the compound annual growth rate of e-book sales revenue in the United Kingdom climbed by almost 19 percent in a decade. This steady revenue growth evidences the increased demand for digital book formats, but that is not to say that print books have a bleak future. Consumers continue to enjoy reading physical copies of their favorite stories and there are few signs to suggest that this will change in the immediate future.
Book consumption in the UK
Digital alternatives to print offer consumers new ways to engage with books and can make reading more accessible and mobile. At the same time, print book consumption remains high. According to the results of a global study on book format readership, 34 percent of consumers in the United Kingdom favored print books, whereas very few respondents read e-books or audiobooks exclusively. Overall, survey participants most enjoyed reading a combination of book formats, with 40 percent saying that they read print books, e-books, and audiobooks. A separate survey held in the United Kingdom investigating preferred book formats found that the majority of those aged 16 years or above typically read physical paperback or hardback books, and although audiobooks were less popular, more than 20 percent most commonly read e-books.This engagement with multiple formats is encouraging news for publishers, who can capitalize on UK book readers’ longstanding love of print as well as their interest in new and emerging alternatives.
