Sports book readers taking to digital age as boom in e-books makes up for slump in print sales
Sales of printed books fell by nearly 5 per cent last year with a corresponding rise in e-book downloads as more readers embraced the idea of getting their reading fix via the digital format. With e-readers flying off the shelves in the run-up to Christmas, data from Neilsen BookScan pointed to a decline of £74m in sales of conventional books. The Bookseller reckoned that physical book sales in the final week of 2012 were down 70 per cent compared with the last week of 2011. E-books now account for around 14 per cent of the total market, a rise of five per cent on last year, although the trend towards selling e-books at a fraction of the printed book price led to a fall in the total value of the book market in 2011. Novels remain the big sellers in the digital market, led by E L James's erotic '50 Shades' trilogy, which sold close to 11 million copies in 2012 for £47.3 million, displacing J K Rowling’s 2007 record of £42.6m. According to the Daily Telegraph,