Sales of digital books grew during confinement

With the closure of almost all the physical bookstores in most of the countries affected by the pandemic, the sale of digital books grew four hundred percent. This is cited by an article published by the Argentine portal El Clarín that additionally says that there is a traffic of 600 thousand users while publishers such as Penguin Random House had sales of over 50 percent in ebooks.

Juan Ignacio Boido, editorial director of Penguin Random House expressed in the same article: "There is a paradox that people are probably reading more, although, in Argentina, the vast majority of books are sold in bookstores and today they are all closed, which has a major impact on publishers, printers, distributors and, of course, on the premises. Although these days saw an increase in the sale of digital formats (the ebook and the audiobook, in which Random has been investing a lot) they are not massively popular formats in Argentina, with which it is impossible to compensate for the fall of physical books. "

For his part, Andrés Ramírez, editorial director of the Debolsillo editions of the Penguin Random House publishing group, said in an interview with the Mexican newspaper “El Economista”: “We have opted for digital books, to help fellow booksellers to make the e-book commerce a real and functional option,… since the beginning of confinement, the consumption of digital books has been growing between twenty and thirty percent ”

Migration from paper reading to screen reading

In another article in the Spanish newspaper El Nacional, they assured that sales increased by fifty percent during the confinement, citing Libranda, the main distributor of the electronic book in large international digital stores and independent bookstores.

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In the case of Editorial Planeta, the increase has been forty percent, becoming a novelty that continues to be repeated in online bookstores such as Amazon Kindle, Apple, and Google, says the same news portal.

They also cite the Nubico digital platform, which registered a high increase in “new subscribers, tripling the usual daily figures in the contemporary novel and crime novel genres."

The Shadow of Amazon

Similarly, the Wmagazín portal in Spain states that "One in four books read is electronic and self-publishing increases," going from eleven to thirty percent.

Wmagazín cites Bookwire's report on the digital ebook market in Spain and Latin America, where the sales increase was fifty-two percent.

The portal concludes according to the Barometer of book purchases, that forty percent "read on paper, while 20% already read books on digital media"

As a consequence of the Covid-19, the consumption habits have changed and in addition to all of the above, a new culture of readers worldwide can be anticipated, which will progressively increase the number of sales of Ebooks, without leaving aside the consumption of paper books.