Springer Science & Business Media are the second largest scientific, technical and medical publisher. They are saying that the Kindle is transforming academic publishing much faster than the consumer market.
FT.com has an article describing Springer’s leaps in academic ebooks. The key snippets include -
Mr Ernst said: “We expect in the next few years that within the STM [scientific, technical and medical] market more than half of our book revenues will come from e-books“.
Although Springer still supplies physical copies, “the demand and use of the content clearly moved towards electronic in the last few years”.
“I believe that the [economic] crisis will accelerate the migration from print to electronic.”
What percentage of Springer’s Sales are ebooks?
Well, they won’t say. They do note that while trade publishers think ebooks in 2009 will be no more than 3% of total sales, for Springer it will be a significant percentage. They’re rather pleased that -
- They can cut out the middlemen and sell directly to libraries, hospitals and corporations.
- They can push the cost saving potential of ebooks to libraries.
To the point that they’ve made 22,500 books available on the Kindle. It’s interesting that they mention more than half of revenues (and not unit sales). So their prediction is even more ambitious than 50% ebook penetration.
Academic Segment healthy and growing
John Wiley & Sons reported their results on June 18th, and -
- They had a 22% EPS growth and 3.4% revenue growth (if you factor out currency factors).
- They say it was a result of strong growth in the Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly (SMTS) and Higher Education (HE) segments.
- They are projecting EPS growth of 10% in fiscal year 2010.
The report has a lot of details (such as SMTS revenue being nearly a billion dollars) and is well worth perusing in its entirety.
It certainly seems like academic publishing is doing well, despite the economic downturn and the alleged ‘death of reading’.
The Kindle family, in particular the Kindle DX line, are well placed to cash in on the strength of academic publishing. If -
- Spinger are right about ebooks accounting for 50% of revenues in a few years; and
- John Wiley’s strong results and strong growth predictions are echoed by other academic publishers.
Academic publishing might become one of the two most important markets for the Kindle.
Filed under: kindle | Tagged: kindle academic, kindle in education
