A leading Polish ebookstore Virtualo has just published a very interesting report that could give you a better view on what’s happening on our ebook market.
Ebook market size
According to Virtualo (see the chart, top left part), net ebook sales in Poland reached 22 million PLN last year (7 million USD). The forecast for 2014 is 13 million USD, and for 2015 it’s almost 20 million USD.
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These estimates are reliable.
Virtualo runs an ebook storefront, but also is a resource platform for other ebook retailers, including Emplik, the Polish Barnes&Noble.
In the report they estimated sales in the entire ebook business, but it was rather easy to do. Besides Virtualo-based ebookstores, there are only few other major players: Nexto, Legimi, and Woblink.
Number of ebooks
Currently Virtualo offers 31 thousand titles, in four file formats: epub, mobi, pdf, and mp3.
As you see in the top right part of the chart, the number of ebooks in Virtualo (and we can assume this is happening proportionally in other ebookstores) has doubled in two years.
There is, however, one essential thing happening. Polish ebook market is moving away from DRM. Some ebookstores, like Ebook Point, offer DRM-free titles. Adobe-based system is less and less popular. It’s watermark that is still there.
Poland is still driven by epub (25 thousand on Virtualo). Mobi is getting stronger and stronger (15 thousand), due to popularity of Kindle devices. In fact, Polish ebookstores are very creative in approaching Kindle owners, filling an empty hole called “Kindle Store Poland”.
Most popular categories
Literary fiction and non-fiction are most popular categories on Virtualo, accounting for 32% of all titles sold. They’re followed by detective stories and thrillers (26%), and romance/erotica (10%).
Virtualo sold last year 500,000 ebooks. What’s very interesting, users who had been buying ebooks in 2012, have bought about 40% more ebooks last year.
Ebook prices
In Virtualo report we read that the average price of the ebook in literary fiction category is 19,50 PLN (6.34 USD). This number needs interpretation.
First, there are a lot of public domain books on offer, and they are not free, so they have to be included in the calculation. They draw the average price down. The only thing is that hottest bestsellers don’t come to literary fiction, but to other categories.
The usual list price of the bestseller on Virtualo is around 34.90 PLN (11 USD). This is a list price of Dan Brown’s Inferno.
Now, the next essential factor comes in. Virtualo runs a hell lot of promotions – continually. Inferno can be bought today for 8 USD. So, if you’re tracking deals from Virtualo, you’ll pay between 7 and 10 USD for the new bestseller.
Virtualo has learned the Kindle Daily Deal lesson, but promotions are not so intense in other Polish ebookstores. If you’re looking for an estimate for the entire market, a better reference is 10 USD for a hot new release.
Via Świat Czytników, Innovation PR.
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More to come from my home ebook market. Stay tuned, get free updates by RSS or email.
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