11 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections Earlier Developments In its annual report for 2010, the PA disclosed growing digital sales gures, demonstrating the acceleration of the digital market in the UK. The overall size of the digital market stood at £180 million (British pounds), having increased by 38 percent from 2009. Most striking was the rapid growth of total consumer digital sales, which increased by 318 percent from £4 million to £16 million between 2009 and 2010. This gure includes consumer ebooks, downloads, and audiobooks. Consumer sales of ebooks and downloads account for 11 percent (from 2 percent in 2009) of the British book market. The eld leaders are still academic and professional publishers, whose sales doubled over three years, amounting to 72 percent of all digital sales. According to the PA, academic publishers were involved in digital publication before trade publishers, mainly because many of the bigger scholarly journal publishers are also the largest academic and professional publish- ers. The trade side started to take o only after the open- ing of a localized UK Kindle store in August 2010 and with the arrival of the Apple iPad in the UK. (Source: Communication from the PA for this study.) In Europe, the UK ebook market comes closest to that of the US in size and growth because of its vibrant per- formance in digital publishing. According to the PA, about 1 million ebooks are available. (It is important to note that some of these are US-listed titles for which there are actually no UK rights.) At the forefront in digital publishing are academic publishers Taylor and Francis, Springer, Pearson, Penguin, and Bloomsbury. In spring 2011, Penguin reported a growth of 180 percent in global ebook sales against early 2010, constituting 14 percent of overall sales across the Penguin Group (21 percent in the US, and 8 percent in the UK) by late summer of 2011. Penguin o ers nearly 6,500 ebook titles on their website (source: Penguin company information). Independent publisher Blackwell’s stores, 6 Foyles stores, and 700 Argo stores, as well as online in October 2012. In April 2012, Sony entered the eld of content o erings by opening its Reader Store UK with digital editions of old and new ction and non ction books. Retailers in the traditional book sphere also secured their part of the pie: Tesco acquired the ebook platform MobCast with 130,000 ebook titles from British publishers (buchreport, September 5, 2009). With numerous new dedicated ereaders under £70 to multifunctional tablets of various brands and operating systems—and a new strong push in early fall of 2012 before the end-of-year holidays—the underlying sales trend points to a shift from dedicated black-and-white gadgets to full-color tablets. At this point, though, dedi- cated ereaders still occupy a signi cant market share. One-third of Britons owned an ereader as of early 2012, and 40 percent of readers of ebooks do so on a Kindle. But tablets have more than doubled their market share to approximately 12 percent among readers of ebooks (The Bookseller, May 15, 2012 for the evolution of devices, see The Bookseller, September 10, 2012). Midyear 2012 revenue reports from major publishers paint an inconclusive picture of how the developments for print and ebooks have a ected the bottom line. Still, pro tability from ebooks is still su ering from the 20 percent VAT on ebooks versus 0 percent VAT for print books the Publishers Association (PA) continues to lobby the government to repair this hurdle (The Bookseller, March 21, 2012), and 5000 consumers have signed a petition to slash the tax for ebooks to 0 percent (The Guardian, March 21, 2012). In e orts to streamline and innovate the ebook experience, some platforms have started to experiment with DRM-free downloads—notably J. K. Rowling, on her own website, Pottermore, which is dedicated to her Harry Potter series. Pearson has announced a subscrip- tion mode in cooperation with PaperC for a limited title list).