Simba Information published its latest report Scholarly & Professional E-Book Publishing 2020-2024. The report found tepid growth in professional e-books for 2019, and the forecast for 2020 shows declining sales based on COVID-19 disruptions.
Academic libraries faced budget pressure prior to the onset of the pandemic, which has hurt books particularly hard after decades of losing budget battles to journals and databases. Law school enrollments are declining in the key American market.
Globally, scholarly and professional e-books have been growing steadily for years, but the market is starting to mature. That combined with the expected impact of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns have hurt the outlook for the professional e-book segment. Simba forecasts professional e-books will be flat (a compound annual rate of -0.2%) for the period between 2020 to 2024.
The overall market is divided into constituent subject categories of science and technology, medical, law, business and social science and humanities publishing. Only professional and research level publishing is included. This excludes both trade publishing and introductory level higher education textbook sales.
Leading players include RELX (Both Elsevier and LexisNexis), Springer Nature, Thomson Reuters (West Publishing), John Wiley & Sons, Informa (Taylor & Francis), McGraw-Hill Education, Wolters Kluwer (Ovid), Cengage, Pearson and Thieme. Smaller publishers, university presses and scholarly societies that publish digital monographs or collections would also be targets.
Professional E-Book Publishing Industry Analysis
For more in-depth information on the professional e-book market size, market share, and sales statistics for 2020 and beyond, see Scholarly & Professional E-Book Publishing 2020-2024.
This report provides an overview and financial outlook for the global scholarly and professional e-book publishing markets based on specific research and analysis of the leading competitors’ performance. Leading competitor’s performance is projected through 2020. Scholarly and professional market categories are projected through 2024. The report also discusses trends, challenges, pricing models, usage, major e-book publishers, aggregators and platform providers.
About the author: Dan Strempel is a Senior Analyst at Simba Information, where he has authored more than 26 studies over the past 14 years. His research has been cited in numerous publications including CNBC, Newsweek, Publishing Executive, The Association of American Publishers, and The Society for Scholarly Publishing. You can follow Dan on Twitter, where he shares industry news and analysis.
