Today we travelled around the world in 8 hours with the London Book Fair Quantum Conference, receiving the most up to date marketing knowledge about the book industry across multiple key countries.

eBooks in India

Arriving a bit late to the party, our journey started in India for the ‘eBooks in India’ talk. In this it was revealed that India is in fact the second largest English language publisher in the world. The book industry in India plays a crucial role in the development of the entire country’s development.

Focusing more on the main discussion of this talk, the eBook market in India doesn’t appear to be rapidly taking off. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that Indian consumers don’t trust paying on credit card online and if they do make online purchases these tend to go through their phone bills. Coinciding with this, eReaders have not taken off the ground either, instead eBooks tend to be purchased through Smartphones, linking back to consumers paying for products through their phone bills.

Another factor which was considered is that eBooks are not priced as attractively as print books, so there’s an important lesson to learn here in creating value for money. The best-selling genres within the eBook market in India are romance and erotica, which reflect on the notion that eBooks are mainly being purchased by young adult readers.

Nielsen Reveals Key Market Statistics for Key Countries

Our next stop was looking at international markets with Nielsen’s, unveiling key market statistics for key countries in the publishing industry. Porter Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief at Publishing Perspectives, spoke with Andre Breedt at Nielsen’s, first going over their global consumer confidence survey. This indicated the countries where consumer confidence is high, with the highest increase in consumer confidence being apparent in the US, China, Japan and Germany.

Moving on, Anderson and Breedt analysed Nielsen book scan, which showed point of sale purchases of physical books by consumers. From the trends in book purchasing, we were able to see that Ireland and the UK were coming out of the recession faster than most European countries. Looking further afield there was a high growth rate within the children’s book market in South Africa, and New Zealand are experiencing healthy growth.

The most positive news to take from this global analysis was that the US had an increase of 2.8% in the physical book market from 2015, which is a good indicator for the world book market. In terms of eBooks across the world, the UK and the US hold the most significant eBook markets. The sales of eReaders do not necessarily reflect the sales of eBooks with multi-device platforms such as tablets and smartphones being used to store and read eBooks on. The main threat to the industry appears to be other digital mediums.

Twitter Chat: Wattpad, Summit Media PH

The Philippines are experiencing probably one of the most progressive forms of publishing in 2016 for helping new authors get to the top. Wattpad is a platform which allows absolutely anyone to write and publish their book online and it’s a completely free service. Over 90% of all Wattpad activity is mobile, with 50% of stories written on mobile devices. Overall there’s over 200 million uploads on Wattpad.

Wattpad is already big in the US, but in the Philippines it’s really filling a gap for their multi-lingual writers. The most used language for stories on Wattpad in the Philippines is Taglish - a mix of English and Tagalog. The demographic for Wattpad users in the Philippines is with the millennials, aged 13-30.

Although this is obviously a form of digital publishing, which would suggest that the digital publishing industry in the Philippines is huge, the physical book market is still the preference for most Filipino millennials. Summit Media work with Wattpad to help those successful writers on Wattpad in the Philippines to get officially published.

The book conference then went on to discuss the markets in South Africa on Twitter, a webinar from Brazil and the 8 hours ended talking about the US market on Twitter. If you missed out on anything simply search #Quantum16 on twitter or check out their webcasts here.