Bloomsbury hails ‘the year of the e-book’ as sales take big leap

The publisher said revenues of £90.7m were up 4 per cent in the year to December 31, while profits excluding one-off items lifted to £8.4m from £7.7m a year earlier.

Strong demand for Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which was turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts, and the Harry Potter books following the film release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows helped Bloomsbury’s sales in the final quarter of the year.

Bloomsbury predicted that 2011 will be “the year of the e-book” as more titles become available for download, sales of handheld devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad grow rapidly, and the UK gains the kind of momentum seen in the United States, where e-books account for 15 per cent of sales.

The trend was highlighted by the success of the 2010 Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, which saw 42 per cent of its US sales through e-books in its first month. Chief executive Nigel Newton said: “Bloomsbury had an excellent year with a number of best-selling titles and particularly buoyant sales in the final quarter.

“We are also benefiting from our strong position in digital publishing which continues to experience exciting and unprecedented growth.”

Bloomsbury, which published nearly 1,800 e-books in 2010, was encouraged by industry figures showing that people with handheld devices buy more e-books than they bought paper books.

In the UK, revenues increased 6.5 per cent to £62.7m.

Bloomsbury said the first two months of 2011 are “normally fairly quiet” but this year has seen “a lot of activity” as one of its new publications, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, reached number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list.

It has a strong line-up of new books and is due to publish a graphic novel adaptation of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and a novel by Orange Prize winner Ann Patchett.

n Publisher Pearson has reported stronger than expected earnings. See page six.