Bright Future for Scandinavian Digital Publishing

Approximately 90 Scandinavian publishing executives gathered a couple weeks ago in Copenhagen, Denmark at the historic Carlsberg brewery for the annual invitation-only Scandinavian Publishing Executive Meeting. The conference was organized by Schilling, a strategic consultancy for Scandinavian publishers.

The conference took a decidedly international theme by importing speakers from Spain, the U.K. and United States, including yours truly representing Smashwords, and Nyree Belleville, a best-selling Smashwords author who writes under the pen names Bella Andre and Lucy Kevin.

Scandinavia is representative of the vast majority of global ebook markets where ebooks still represent less than one percent of overall trade book sales. Like the markets in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia which have experienced a rapid transition to ebooks over the last two and three years, the building blocks are now falling into place for Scandinavia to experience similar exponential growth as readers transition from paper reading to screen reading.

Personal highlights of the conference:

• Apple's Nordic region manager talked about the iPad's potential to unleash the creativity of authors and publishers
• Pete Downton, a former VP at Warner Music, urged book publishers not to repeat the errors of music publishers (who dealt with change by raising prices and suing customers).
• Nyree Belleville talked about how she'll earn over $1 million this year selling indie ebooks, and why she's unlikely to go back to traditional publishing
• Presentations from four interesting publishing startups - 24Symbols, Jellybooks, Smashwords and Valobox - exploring new business models to connect readers with books
• An overarching theme of unprecedented opportunity for the world's authors and publishers to leverage the power of global distribution to reach new markets with ebooks that were previously unreachable via print.

I wrote a blog post over at Publishing Perspectives exploring the above sessions and others in greater detail. Click here to read A Bright Future for Scandinavian Digital Publishing.

Apple iBookstore Expands Smashwords Ebook Distribution to 26 New Countries

Apple this week dramatically expanded the international reach of Smashwords ebooks by distributing our catalog to 26 new iBookstores across Europe and Scandinavia.

Prior to this week, over 50,000 Smashwords ebook titles were available in Apple iBookstores in the US, Canada, U.K., Germany, France and Australia.

All Smashwords authors, publishers and agents enjoy immediate access to this expanded distribution.

Below is the list of new iBookstore countries now reachable through Smashwords.

Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland

Go Global With Smashwords

Within the next few years, the global market for ebooks will likely eclipse the US market. Already at Smashwords, I can report that prior to this news, almost half of our iBookstore sales were coming from outside the U.S.

Although the US represents the world’s single largest ebook market today and is still growing rapidly, the US market is also the most mature. Growth rates in the US, where the ebook market has more than doubled each year for the last several years, are likely to slow thanks to the law of large numbers (you can't keep doubling forever!). I expect the US will end 2011 with ebooks accounting for 15-25% of trade book sales.

Contrast this with markets outside the US, where ebooks will account for probably between 1% and 5% of the market this year. These markets are only now beginning to enter, or will soon enter, exponential growth phases that will take them to 15-25% the next few years assuming their growth trajectories follow similar patterns seen in the US and other English speaking countries.

Indie authors will reap a two-fold benefit. They now have access to more markets, and these markets will grow faster than the U.S. in the years ahead.

The necessary ingredients for this growth include availability of affordable ebook content in concert with low-cost e-reading devices (dedicated e-readers, multi-function tablets like the iPad, smart phones, personal computers) powered by local-language ebook stores.

This is exciting news for indie ebook authors, not only for authors here in the US but also for indie authors in these new territories. Because Smashwords is an Apple-authorized global aggregator for the iBookstore, authors, publishers and literary agents around the world can use Smashwords to quickly and easily distribute local-language ebooks into their country's iBookstore, as well as to Apple iBookstores outside their country.

My thanks to our friends at Apple for introducing Smashwords books to these new markets.

If you’re not yet distributing with Smashwords, visit our How to Publish and Distribute Ebooks with Smashwords page. In addition to distributing to the 31 Apple iBookstores, we also distribute your book to the online ebook stores operated by Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Diesel eBookstore and to major mobile app platforms such as Stanza and Aldiko.