Bloomsbury highlights e-book boom

Publisher Bloomsbury has revealed its e-book sales grew eighteen fold in 2010, accounting for almost 10% of print sales as more customers downloaded titles to read on iPads and other handheld devices.

Bloomsbury said revenues of £90.7 million were up 4% in the year to December 31, while profits excluding one-off items lifted to £8.4 million from £7.7 million a year earlier.

Strong demand for Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which was turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts, and the Harry Potter books following the film release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows helped Bloomsbury’s sales in the final quarter of the year.

Bloomsbury predicted that 2011 will be “the year of the e-book” as more titles become available for download, sales of handheld devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad grow rapidly, and the UK gains the kind of momentum seen in the United States, where e-books account for 15% of sales.

The trend was highlighted by the success of the 2010 Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, which saw 42% of its US sales through e-books in its first month.

Chief executive Nigel Newton said: “Bloomsbury had an excellent year with a number of best-selling titles and particularly buoyant sales in the final quarter.

“We are also benefiting from our strong position in digital publishing which continues to experience exciting and unprecedented growth.”

Bloomsbury, which published nearly 1,800 e-books in 2010, was encouraged by industry figures showing that people with handheld devices buy more e-books than they bought paper books.

In the UK, revenues increased 6.5% to £62.7 million, helped by titles such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Everyday, and the success of Public Library Online, which helps libraries offer online access to books.

Bloomsbury said the first two months of 2011 are “normally fairly quiet” but this year has seen “a lot of activity” as one of its new publications, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, reached number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list.