On paidContent, Laura Hazard Owen has a number of charts based on data from Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s recent outlook report on the future of the global e-book market to 2016. These charts break down growth by region, and to countries within specific regions.
PWC’s report believes overall book spending in the US will be relatively flat, and that spending on paper books will decline as e-books take up the slack so that by 2016 “e-books will account for half of total spending on consumer books.” Total value of the market will be $21 billion—only $1.5 billion more than 2011’s $19.5 billion market.
The data from PWC suggests that adoption of e-books in the US will skyrocket while the rest of the world mostly has shallow adoption slopes. It’s not exactly a surprise; e-books have had a much greater head start here in the US, and the chicken-or-egg nature of adoption means that the more people have e-book readers, the faster e-book spending will grow. The rest of the world still has some catching up to do.
