E-books: Publishers are Decreasing Prices in Spite of Consumers’ Willingness to Pay More

For a while now, e-books have stepped out of their niche. Even though they’re still not meeting the sales numbers of print books, during the last ten years, a significant increase of e-book content, suppliers, and readers have shaped the publishing industry. To take a closer look at this development, we compared two international studies about consumers’ reading behavior, conducted in 2011 and end 2020.

As in every other industry, digitalization is a driving force in the publishing industry. E-books especially are a content format that is increasingly attractive to readers. And therefore has the potential to at least partially compensate publishers and suppliers for print books’ drop in sales. If we look at the time frame between 2010 and 2020, we find that revenues for e-books are constantly on the rise: In the US, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for e-books has been 13.3 percent, while in the UK and Germany it was as high as 18.9 percent and an…