Speaking about the market of electronic books, do not forget about digital libraries

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The largest player in the market of electronic books - Amazon - is known, perhaps, to everyone. But about the Japanese company Rakuten, which owns the second largest share in this market, heard not all.

As a rule, when estimating the e-book market, only the number of units sold is taken into account, Forbes says . Digital libraries rarely fall in the field of view of research companies, and meanwhile, by the number of downloads they are able to compete with the largest sellers of digital content.

For example, according to the latest data from the Author Earnings rating, Amazon's sales totaled 406 million books, Apple iBooks - 44 million, and Barnes & Noble - 19.4 million for all time. At the same time, the Rakuten OverDrive electronic library account has an impressive 225 million downloads, of which 155 million were electronic text books, and 68 million - audiobooks.

In other words, the library belonging to the Japanese giant of electronic commerce occupies the second place in terms of downloads, falling behind only Amazon. Many other digital libraries can also boast very solid figures: from Hoopla's website in 2016, users downloaded more than 6 million pieces of content. But neither OverDrive, nor Hoopla, nor other major libraries in the market reviews simply do not.

The fact is that the authors of the surveys take into account the book sold by the publisher to the library as one sale - regardless of how many thousands (or millions) of times it is downloaded from there. Although this does not prevent them from including in their reviews data on other downloads, for which users also do not pay directly - for example, the results of an electronic subscription Kindle Unlimited from Amazon.

As a result, this selective approach greatly distorts our understanding of the e-book market, and the incomplete list of its largest participants or incorrect sales results by category are by no means the most serious problems. More importantly, we do not understand the general situation in the industry - the real popularity of electronic books as such and the role of various channels for their distribution.

The impressive results of digital libraries tell us that consumers are increasingly understanding the essence of e-books. Buying them, people acquire not so much a product as a license to read a certain work. And from this point of view, downloading the book "for free" (having paid for a subscription to the library) seems more reasonable to them than to pay for a certain book to the seller.

If this trend continues, the e-book market can expect serious changes. But in order to notice their approach, you need to see the big picture.