by Joseph T. Sinclair

How many Eng­lish read­ers are there in the world? No telling. But there are esti­mates of how many peo­ple can speak Eng­lish as either a first or sec­ond lan­guage. David Crys­tal, a British lin­guist, esti­mates that non-native Eng­lish speak­ers out­num­ber native speak­ers 3 to 1. With esti­mates of native speak­ers at over 400 mil­lion, non-native speak­ers, there­fore, num­ber over 1.2 bil­lion. The grand total is over 1.6 bil­lion. Some experts esti­mate as high as 2 billion.

For authors and pub­lish­ers, these sta­tis­tics are an eye-open­er. Do you want to exploit the New Zealand book mar­ket or the Indi­an book mar­ket? The Aus­tralian book mar­ket or the Pak­istani book mar­ket? Again, we don’t know the lit­er­a­cy rate of the Eng­lish speak­ers (as a sec­ond lan­guage), but we can prob­a­bly assume that it’s high­er than the local lan­guage lit­er­a­cy rate in many under­de­vel­oped coun­tries; the Eng­lish speak­ers are per­haps more like­ly to be edu­cat­ed. In any event, the world­wide lit­er­a­cy rate is now about 85%, high­er than you might have guessed.

You can hard­ly over­es­ti­mate the Wow! fac­tor in the size of the poten­tial Eng­lish-lan­guage book mar­kets abroad. The ques­tion is, how do you reach such markets?

The tra­di­tion­al way has been to farm out the copy­rights to for­eign pub­lish­ers. This has been done in the past for a small frac­tion of print­ed books to a small num­ber of addi­tion­al coun­tries for each book. But the world has changed. Easy world­wide dis­tri­b­u­tion is now pos­si­ble via dig­i­tal books. No local pub­lish­er is need­ed. But how?

For­tu­nate­ly, the iOS (Apple) and Android oper­at­ing sys­tems for smart­phones and tablets were invent­ed in the US and are the most wide­ly used in the world. The US-led con­sor­tium has set the stan­dards for ebook for­mats too. Con­se­quent­ly, Eng­lish-speak­ing cus­tomers abroad can buy ebooks on Ama­zon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and the like and read them via ebook-read­er apps (e.g., Ama­zon read­er app).

The ques­tion is, does the ebook avenue ful­ly pen­e­trate the inter­na­tion­al book mar­kets? How many peo­ple in the US have an Ama­zon account? It turns out that Ama­zon has about 150 mil­lion prime accounts. 

Thus the Ama­zon dig­i­tal book mar­ket is only a frac­tion of the 1.6 bil­lion poten­tial mar­ket for Eng­lish-speak­ing peo­ple. You go to Google Play to get Android apps and to Apple App Store to get Apple apps. You can’t use your smart­phone with­out an account to a source of apps.

Could it be that books in an app for­mat (i.e., bookapps) might sell bet­ter than books in an ebook for­mat? It’s my con­clu­sion that ebooks are dis­tinct­ly sep­a­rate from bookapps, and bookapps have larg­er poten­tial sales world­wide than books in an ebook format.

Inci­den­tal­ly, Ama­zon start­ed as an online book­store and now has a 50% share of the US book mar­ket. Over 50% of Ama­zon’s sales are alleged to be ebooks. That adds up to at least 25% of the US mar­ket being ebook sales. But the oth­er 50% of the US book mar­ket cer­tain­ly includes a sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of ebooks. Could the num­ber of ebook cus­tomers be close to 50% of the US book market?

There is a huge num­ber of ebooks pub­lished that do not appear in the Ama­zon sta­tis­tics or nation­al sta­tis­tics. Indeed, it is like­ly that ebook sales out­num­ber print­ed book sales by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin. This phe­nom­e­non illus­trates after only a lit­tle more than a decade of exis­tence, ebooks are sur­pris­ing­ly pop­u­lar. That bodes well for bookapps. After all, bookapps are dig­i­tal books in a dif­fer­ent for­mat with a huge untapped poten­tial mar­ket worldwide.

The star­tling news for authors and pub­lish­ers is that dig­i­tal books (in var­i­ous for­mats) have expand­ed the mar­ket for books in Eng­lish by an esti­mat­ed 300% (and for books from the US by 700%). The even more star­tling news is that to reach the entire mar­ket is much eas­i­er and less expen­sive than the tra­di­tion­al way (for print­ed books). Indeed, it’s fea­si­ble for very small pub­lish­ers to do so. And the even more-than-that star­tling news is that inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers have a huge advan­tage over tra­di­tion­al publishers.

What’s the advan­tage? Inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers can prof­itably pub­lish bookapps. But bookapps typ­i­cal­ly sell for less; tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ers can­not sell bookapps so cheap­ly. Think of all that cor­po­rate overhead.

There­fore, it seems to me that the ulti­mate future for books is as bookapps, not ebooks. Although there are many rea­sons for this beyond the demo­graph­ics, nonethe­less the demo­graph­ics are com­pelling too. Every­one with a smart­phone has instant access to apps and knows how to buy and use apps. Not every smart­phone user has instant access to ebooks or can afford them.

Anoth­er book for­mat of the future is a web­book. That is, a book that’s a web­site, and the web­site is the book, noth­ing more. The dif­fer­ence between bookapps and web­books is that an author/publisher sells bookapps, and bookapps appear in an app cat­a­log for sale (e.g., Google Play). In con­trast, an author/publisher pub­lish­es web­books free to read­ers, makes mon­ey by inte­grat­ing affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing, is not lim­it­ed by any oth­er busi­ness (e.g., Apple or Google), and keeps more of the revenue.

But enough about con­cepts for future pub­lish­ing. This blog will get into the details in future posts. And it’s the details that will make you successful.

So we’ve seen the demo­graph­ics of Eng­lish speak­ers. Let’s look at the cell phone demo­graph­ics. Accord­ing to indus­try esti­mates over five bil­lion peo­ple now have cell phones. About three bil­lion of those are smart­phones. Astound­ing! In a few more years, there will be five bil­lion smart­phone users. Com­bine the Eng­lish-speak­er demo­graph­ics with the esti­mates of the num­bers of smart­phone users togeth­er with the already well-estab­lished dig­i­tal book mar­ket, and you’re star­ing at a ris­ing tsuna­mi of Eng­lish-lan­guage pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties beyond the imag­i­na­tion. You are the deer star­ing into the headlights.

Are you ready?