25
jump to just under 16 million units, and PRH’s slight contraction (–0.9%), Hachete sold 3.8 million more e-books than its rival. While the two giants had been neck and neck in the e-book race for a while—sometimes separated by a few thousand copies annually—a more aggressive pricing strategy change from Hachete several years ago, combined with the acquisition and growth of digital-first arm Bookouture, has meant that since 2017 there has been a widening gulf. Hachete has been at least three million e-units ahead each year, with the 5.1 million copies in the pandemic digital bonanza of 2020 the largest gap. In our Review of 2023 two weeks ago looking at the publishing groups, we noted that PRH had a monster year at the top of the Nielsen BookScan print charts. That remains true in digital. In The Bookseller’s weekly Publisher E-Book Ranking top 20s in 2023, PRH had a 44% share of entries and half (25 of the 50 rankings we ran in the year) of the number ones. Thirteen of those top spots were from Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry (Transworld) alone, while a Richard Osman title accounted for a quarter of all of PRH’s 2023 e-ranking entries. Contrast that to Hachete’s footprint: a 22% share of all the top 20 entries and a slimmer eight number ones. With a three-week run in October, J K Rowling’s latest Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave (Sphere), was its only title with multiple number ones. Incidentally,
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Of the 50 Publisher E-Book Ranking number ones in 2023 were claimed by Penguin Random House titles
Galbraith, Rebecca Yarros and Colleen Hoover were responsible for two out of every five of Hachete’s entries in the e-rankings. The Publisher E-Book Ranking is the merest snapshot of the digital market as it has limited participants: five of the Big Six here (Simon & Schuster contributes to the monthly ranking but not the weekly) plus digital specialist Joffe Books—along with a threshold that excludes titles with a digital selling price under £2. But it is perhaps indicative of Hachete’s strategy across the board that its most successful digital division, Bookouture, did not have one title featuring in the e-ranking during 2023. A brief backstep to the T&Cs: the publisher-
provided digital sales here represent individ- ual e-books sold (no free titles) in the UK only, excluding all overseas territories (including the Republic of Ireland). It also does not include other tpes of products, Collins’ or Hodder Education’s digital provision to schools, for example. PRH’s total excludes DK,
while Bloomsbury—which joined the panel in 2019—incorporates Head of Zeus. This yearly exercise in no way encapsulates the full digital market, nor is it intended to, as the only folk who can really give accurate big picture numbers are the Lords of Amazon. But combine the e-book totals with BookScan UK print sales and the Big Six shiſted 157.2 million
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units last year, 27.8% of which derived from digital. Despite the collective digital sales rising, that “e” proportion shrank marginally from 2022. In the past six years, excepting the pandemic spike, that percentage has more or less stabilised in the 26%–28% range.
Stabilisation is the key word, as the market seems to have setled into a balance aſter some of those “e”-versus-“p” ructions 10 to 15 years ago. The two sides simply complement each other now. Bookouture (and now also Sourcebooks) superstar Freida McFadden has metamorphosed into a bricks-and-mortar hit, shiſting
£755,000 through the Total Consumer Market last year. HarperCollins had a number of e-first smashes switch to print last year, such as Evie Woods’ The Lost Bookshop (One More Chapter) and Kat Brent’s How to Kill Men and Get Away With It (HQ Digital). Digital-first indies such as Boldwood and Canelo have increased their physical presence, alongside top self-publishing authors forming publish- ers to sell into shops (L J Ross’ Dark Skies, J M Dalgliesh’s Hamilton Press…). It maters less where the sales come from, because the demarcation line between digital and print has become far more blurry.
6
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2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
‘E’ volume 9,607,000
10,632,000 11,945,490 9,260,990 9,149,741 9,213,770 11,722,686 8,812,046 8,808,104
Growth 29.1%
10.7% 12.4% –22.5% –1.2% 0.7%
27.2% –25.0% 0.0%
2023 7,800,905 –11.4%
TheBookseller.com
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
‘E’ volume 6,000,000
5,537,000 4,200,000 4,183,386 4,183,386 4,192,000 4,420,000 3,831,014 3,320,199 3,661,981
Growth 10.3%
–7.7%
–24.2% –0.4% 0.0% 0.2% 5.4%
–13.0% –13.3% 10.3%
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
‘E’ volume n/a
n/a n/a n/a n/a
785,909
1,033,559 1,802,336 1,977,145 2,275,767
31.5% 74.0% 9.7%
15.1%
Growth
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
‘E’ volume 2,600,000
2,593,000 2,442,000 2,734,513 2,071,016 1,789,291 2,283,878 1,851,770 1,588,501
Growth –0.3%
–0.3% –5.8% 11.9% –24.3% –13.6% 27.6% –19.0% –14.2%
2023 1,723,690 8.5% 07
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