The Briton’s love affair with e-books seems to be over. The country reported a sharp dip in e-book sales last year which, the Bookseller said quoting a report from Nielsen BookData is the lowest it has been since 2012. It is 80 million e-books that were downloaded in 2021 which makes for a significant drop from the 95 million e-books which were downloaded in 2020, which also happens to be the highest it has been in recent times.

What is interesting though is that buyers still splurged more on e-books than what they did in 2012, 2013, and 2019. Also, of the 80 million e-books downloaded in 2021, one in every five books sold happened to be an e-book. This again made for 13 percent of the entire market value. The sale of print books remained steady though while audiobooks continued with their stellar performance and went on to witness record levels of adoption in 2021 as well.

Coming to the specific e-book genres that went for the most downloads, it is erotica that topped the list with 61 percent of all e-books downloaded, followed by romance and adventure/ war which made up 59 percent and 50 percent of the market share. Fiction titles made up 43 percent which is a decline from the 50 percent share of e-book sales recorded in 2020. Also, it is just 3 percent of children’s books that were sold in e-book format which is a slight decline from 4 percent recorded a year ago.

The post E-Book sales in the UK drop to the lowest since 2012 first appeared on Good e-Reader.