Bloomsbury has released a financial report stating it anticipates 2011 to be the “year of the e-book,” The Bookseller reports. Currently its e-book sales come in at just less than 10% of trade print sales. CEO Nigel Newton said that e-books were experiencing “extraordinary” growth.
Bloomsbury released 1,800 e-books in 2010. and saw sales increase considerably—Newton said that e-book owners were buying more e-books now than they had bought print books before they owned an e-reader. (Not too surprising; e-books are often less expensive than print now, so people can afford to buy more of them.)
Looking ahead, the business will adopt a new global structure from tomorrow. Newton said: "With the huge growth in digital publishing the market for books is becoming more global. Our major customers are also becoming more global, and, indeed, so is the media with whom we promote our books. The increasing demand for e-books means that acquiring world rights to books and exploiting them globally is becoming the most effective way of protecting our territorial copyrights."
That’s certainly good news for UK expatriates or fans of British authors living elsewhere. One hopes major American publishers follow suit.
Bloomsbury is perhaps best known among American fantasy fans as the UK publisher of the Harry Potter series. Despite J.K. Rowling’s agent making some noises about eventually allowing them last year, there has still been no sign of their electronic appearance yet—apart from the millions of copies of illicit scans floating around on peer-to-peer, of course. It still remains to be seen whether 2011 will be the year of the Harry Potter e-book.
