Electronic books in the USA - their numbers and development and a comparison to Germany

This article will provide data to specify the problem of low e-book-supply. First the total number of commercially available English-speaking e-books in the US-market is stated. Then the growth of the title supply over the last twenty years is reviewed. Third the growth of the publishing-activities in the e-book-market is set in relation to the developments in the hardcover-market. Finally these numbers of the English-speaking market are compared to the numbers for the German-speaking market. Introduction Asking for the reasons of the slow development of the e-book market Rogers in Library Journal states “[f]irst and foremost is lack of adequate content” (Rogers, 2006). In a user survey recently published by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) one of three main suggestions made was that “[t]he selection of eBooks available should be improved” (IDPF, 2006). The low supply of titles is widely identified as one major problem of the end user e-book market. Nevertheless there is little data published to quantify this problem, except for a highly-quoted article by the IDPF, which estimates that the number of titles published was to rise by 20 % over 2004.[1] This article will provide more data to specify the problem of low e-book-supply. First the total number of commercially available English-speaking e-books in the US-market is stated. Then the growth of the title supply over the last twenty years is reviewed. Third the growth of the publishing-activities in the e-book-market is set in relation to the developments in the hardcover-market. Finally these numbers of the English-speaking market are compared to the numbers for the German-speaking market. Despite the slow development of the end user market libraries have started early to adopt e-books, mainly because electronic books are more easily accessible and searchable. Therefore a main focus of articles in the library literature is on business models for electronic books and the best way to integrate them into a library (amongst others (Dillon, 2001) (Wicht, 2005) (Rao, 2005)). In the last two years some interesting studies on e-book usage were published. These works document how users handle e-books, which might come to help libraries to offer e-books in an appropriate way (Chan, 2005) (Christianson, 2005) (Connaway, 2005). Though the library literature has been focused on integration of e-books, the development of title production in the end user market is important to librarians for two reasons: First, most of the titles will not be published electronically if they cannot be sold on the regular market. Second, the title supply is an indicator for the acceptance of e-books by the end user. Furthermore there is a broad discussion about the definition of the term “e-book” which is not finished yet (Crawford, 2000) (Tedd, 2005). Since the term is used, it shall be stated that it is used in the way Zivcovic proposed: „An electronic book consists of one or more files of monographic character available to the public online or in physical form (on CD-ROM, diskette and the like physical carriers)“ (Zivcovic, 2005). The term “e-book reader” is used for any kind of device and software combination, which is able to display an e-book. As stated above this article focuses on commercial electronic books. Commercial means that the ebook can be bought in the regular book trade. The restriction to commercial e-books was conducted because the number of e-books supplied is an indicator for the demand of e-books, following the principle “demand determines supply”. Therefore it can be concluded, when the commercial title supply is growing, the demand is growing. Finally it is distinguished between Englishand German-speaking titles depending on the language the title is published in. A title in English-language which is published by a German publisher is considered as English-speaking. Number of English-speaking e-books in the US-market The data needed for this examination was obtained from the database Global Books In Print Online (GBIPO). GBIPO contains the bibliographic information of all relevant English-speaking book trade directories. In consultations with organizations in the book industry and with the American Library Association the numbers for the American book production are extracted from this database and published in the article Book Title Output and Average Prices (Grabois, 2006). To check for the completeness of the database fifteen publishers were chosen, and asked via e-mail for the numbers of e-books they published until now. Afterwards the number of titles of the publisher given by GBIPO was compared with the number of titles given by the publishers themselves. It showed that the numbers from the databases differed in nearly all cases from the numbers given by the publishers. This may be due to multiple reasons: First publishers need time to list their titles in GBIPO. This is quite normal and affects a time period of about two years. Second, publishers do not list e-books because they do offer their titles exclusive on their own online-platform. The publisher “Thieme” for example sells electronic editions only to institutions on their own online-platform. For these publishers there is no need to list single titles in GBIPO. That means the total number of electronic books stated is short on titles of the last two years and of titles which are exclusively offered in online-platforms. For it is not possible to avert this problem the number of titles listed must be considered as a minimum. The hit-list shows all in all 160.156 different e-book-titles. When looking at the search results it indicates that some vendors list the same e-book-title several times in different file-formats. Unfortunately, there is no possibility to restrain this search regarding the file-format. Therefore it was necessary to produce a sample to figure out how many e-book-titles were listed several times (doubles), which ran to a sample of n=1.250 titles. A title was classified as double-listed, if there was another entry with the same heading, the same publisher and the same publication year. If an e-book was published in two formats it was once noted in the category “existing once” and again in the category “doubles”. If an e-book-title was published in three different formats it was classified once in the category “existing once” and twice in the category “doubles” and so on. Finally the confidence interval was calculated with a confidence level of 95% [2]: Table 1: Number of English-speaking e-books e-books (sample) (absolute) (in %) e-books (population / confidence interval) (absolute) (in %) exist 1 time 1.083 86,6 135.492 – 141.578 84,6 –88,4