From The Bookseller. More details in the article:
The data, released as part of a seminar held yesterday with Enders Analysis, ‘Digital Seminar: e-books and their impact on the market’, showed genres such as science fiction and romance are “overperforming” thanks to the tastes of early adopters of e-books. For example, the e-book market share of the science fiction and fantasy sector globally for the 10 weeks since June was 10%, more than treble the genre’s market share of print book sales. The share taken by romance and saga books was 14%, seven times its print market share.
Julie Meynink, business development director of Nielsen BookScan, said though it was early days, data from Nielsen BookScan US, which globally represents the biggest share of e-book sales, showed a decline in print sales within these two sectors.
While this doesn’t surprise me, the more interesting question is if the combined market for these genres (e & p) is growing or shrinking. My guess is that it’s growing (since people who read ebooks tend to read more), in which case the only part of the business this is bad for are the small bookstores.
The percentages here are also rather misleading IMO, since even if SF/Fantasy takes up 10% of the ebook market, that market slice is still tiny by several orders of magnitude compared to the 3% of the print one. Having hard figures rather than percentages would be a lot more useful in that respect, since you can then actually see how much ebook sales are affecting the paper ones. All the percentages tell you by themselves, is that SF/Fantasy/Romance are overrepresented in the ebook market compared to the paper one.
Paper is yesterday. E is tomorrow.
“Evans also warned of a “disconnect” between what consumers thought it cost to produce an e-book, and the actual cost. ”
Evans is really taking the p1$$ now……..