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hit (source: various reports summarized by PublishersWeekly, July 8, 2011).Consumers’ attitudes as reported by BISG reflected thedeep and rapid change in the industry, particularly therevenue losses of hardcover and paperback sales. About67% of ebook buyers said that they increased spending onebooks in May 2011, up from 48% in September 2010. Justover 50% of ebook buyers said that they cut back on theirpurchases of printed books in May 2011, and 45% said theyreduced spending on hardcover books.Dedicated ereaders as well as multifunctional devices continuedto gain in popularity in the spring of 2011 as thefavored way to read ebooks, while computers continuedto lose ground (BISG, “Consumer Attitudes Toward E-BookReading,” quoted in Publishers Weekly, August 19, 2011).The leading actor in the ebook market, Amazon.com, alsodominated the US retail market for printed books. Morethan 70% of ebook buyers used the store to buy ebooktitles, an increase of 60% over the previous year. For thesecond quarter of 2011, Amazon reported revenue growthof 51% to $9.91 billion, of which $5.41 billion was in the US($4.51 billion in Europe). Amazon’s Kindle store offered950,000 ebook titles, of which 800,000 cost $9.99 or less;110 of the 111 titles on the bestseller list of the New YorkTimes were available as ebooks for the Kindle.The second heavyweight player in retail, and the strongestcompetitor to Amazon, is Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble.comor BN.com), with more than 2 million ebooksavailable. Although BN.com’s total revenue increased byonly 2% to $1.42 billion (first quarter ending July 2011), itsdigital content and ereader device (NOOK) segment grew140% and represented 19.5% of total sales. With an investmentfrom Liberty Media of $204 million, Barnes & Nobleannounced plans to become the leading bookseller in theUS.BN.com stayed ahead of Apple’s iBookstore and iTunes inMay, with about 27% of ebook buyers going to BN.com,while ebook buyers using the iBookstore or iTunes stayedbelow 10% (and actually fell slightly from January) (BISG,May 2011; Publishers Weekly, August 19, 2011).United KingdomIn the first half of 2013, 20% of the UK book market wasdigital, up from 15% the previous year, and 30% of fictionrevenues came from ebooks, with the rate of digital migrationslowing down in similar ways as in the US.Meanwhile the print book market declined in this periodby 6.7% against the first half of 2012, yet with over a thirdof this drop coming from slower sales of E.L. James FiftyShades of Grey superseller.Overall in 2012, the increase in ebook sales for the first timecompensated for the loss in print: “The invoiced value ofUK publisher sales of books rose 4% in 2012 to £3.3bn witha 66% increase in digital sales offsetting a 1% decrease inphysical book sales.” (The UK Book Publishing Industry inStatistics 2012. UK Publishers Association)In the first half of 2013, the battle around ebook pricing,started in late 2012, has continued, as at first Sony, closelyfollowed by Amazon.co.uk, launched a campaign of 20pebooks, resulting in a significant increase of volumeshipped for some bestselling titles, such as Yann Martel’sLife of Pi selling 406,000 ebooks, or Jonas Jonasson’sHundred-Year-Old Man with 396,000 ebooks sold. Certaintitles of genre fiction, like Sylvia Day’s erotic bestseller Entwinedin You recorded up to 55% of sales from ebooks,while ebooks of narrative nonfiction, like James Bowen’sA Street Cat Named Bob, accounted for a more modest 22%,with Dan Brown’s Inferno, the top bestseller in print, recorded29% digital sales.Random House was the most successful publishing housein the UK, with a 12.6% share in the British print book market.Together with Penguin, which merged with RandomHouse effective July 1, 2013, the new group controls some24.2% of the UK book market. Hachette UK came in third(data from Nielsen/Kantar Worldpanel and Nielsen Book-Scan, quoted together with original research in a “Half Year2013 Review” by The Bookseller, July 19, 2013).Another round of deep discounting of ebooks waslaunched in the summer by Nook and Amazon, offeringfrontlist titles at 99p (The Bookseller, July 31, 2013).Early 2013 also saw the first publishers to introduce a “refinedagency model” with online retailer Amazon.co.uk.Notably HarperCollins and Hachette UK removed text indicatingthat the retail prices for their books were “set bythe publisher” after an antitrust investigation by the EuropeanCommission. This moved resulted in a slight drop inprices ( The Bookseller, April 4, 2013).At the book chain Waterstones, a major restructuring wasannounced in spring 2013 in response to the “unforgivingbookselling environment” (CEO James Daunt, quoted inThe Bookseller May 5, 2013).The Global eBook Report 21