Last year, the combined markets of Western Europe saw over 10 million e-books sold, five times more than the year before. Futuresource Consulting expects the the rise to be almost as big this year, possibly reaching 32 million items sold.
UK sells 50% of European e-books
The United Kingdom accounts for almost half of the e-book sales – mostly because of the British popularity of Amazon’s Kindle. The rest of Europe is far more reluctant, but analysts believe other countries will embrace e-books as well once the offer will become more localised, not as exclusively English as it still is today.
Currently only 1% of the European book market consists of e-book spendings, but Futuresource predicts that this number should rise to 15% in four years time, reaching 1.6 billion euro in 2015.
Germany is Amazon’s hope
Germany is expected to be the market with the biggest potential for growth, their current spendings on books (per capita) being twice as big as the English. Fiona Hoy, market analyst at Futuresource, believes that they will embrace e-books even firmer: “By 2015 the tablet market will account for close to half of all paid-for e-book sales in Germany, compared to around one in three in the UK and France.”
