They are now projecting a highly optimistic 10-fold growth and expect sales to be around $60 million by the end of the year. If you take the example of Bookshop, they have gone from a modest, 4 member team with a bleak outlook in January to sales of over US $6 million, which is light years away from their loftiest projections for the next year last December. As lockdowns and work-from-home situations have been extended across the world, eBook sales are rising and building a revolutionary and new eBook or audiobook platform is just the right thing to do today. Well, why not? The eBook and audiobook market is bristling with activity today. Why should you build an app like Kindle or Audible? The rest of the share is held by Google, Kobo, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and Apple iBooks.īeing the dominant player, Amazon’s Kindle eReader is an extremely popular device, with many individuals referring to eBooks as Kindle versions. The largest piece of the digital-book pie goes to Amazon-accounting for more than half of all electronic book sales globally, and with a staggering estimated figure of 53%, they are the undisputed champions of the eBook market. The global eBook and audiobook industry is majorly divided between into two. Who are the major players in this industry? This will only add to the popularity of the eBook or audiobook platforms as people increasingly stay at home, maintain social distancing and reduce physical book shopping as much as possible to stay safe.Ĭelebrity book readers such as J K Rowling reading the Harry Potter series, Meryl Streep reading Heartburn, and Samuel L Jackson reading A rage in Harlem have popularized the idea of audiobooks as much as eBooks. The Coronavirus pandemic has fuelled the growth of this industry, and the unavailability of books in the lockdown has caused customers to rally to eBook or audiobook stores online in hordes and purchase millions of eBooks and audiobooks in the last 3 months alone. Which means that one in five books sold will be an eBook or an audiobook.Īccording to Globenewswire, “The Global E-Book market is expected to reach $28.73 billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 6.8% from 2018 to 2026.” According to the American Association of Publishers and the Bookseller, the average percentage of physical vs eBook or audiobook sales currently stands at about 19%. eBooks are a major industry and can even rival traditional books in some cases. Audiobooks and eBooks are the two new pillars on which the story world stands today.įirst, the statistics.
This also gave rise to another variation of eBooks-audiobooks. Electronic versions of books that could be read anytime, anywhere-as long as your mobile or e-book reader battery had some juice. Most of us live with this preference for life-and become listeners or readers.Īs times changed, paper became a scarce and often looked down commodity, so the tech world geared up to invent e-books. Once you learn the alphabet and the script of your native language, you start reading these stories in books. You listen to stories from your parents and grandparents, friends, teachers, or on TVs, radios and the ilk. Your initial experiences of learning a story are mostly oral. What this essentially means is that stories can either be read by you or read out to you. The world of stories stands upon two pillars-the first being words, and the second, sounds. Stories are an important part of our lives, and they shape our knowledge about the world around us. Over time, your interest may move to novels, plays and self-help books, but in the end, they are all stories. These stories start with little rhyming sentences of cows jumping over moons and dishes that run away with spoons which then progress to stories like little red riding hood and Panchtantra.
Stories are one of the first things you learn as a child.