Simba: Digital Delivery Breathes New Life into Professional Books and Scholarly Monographs

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Mar 22, 2018, 07:23 ET

STAMFORD, Conn., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Scholarly and professional e-books sales increased globally by 5.6% in 2017 and will grow an additional 4.8% in 2018, revitalizing a medium publishers once wrote off, according to the latest report from Simba Information.

The report, Scholarly & Professional E-Book Publishing 2018-2022, examines the scholarly and professional market including e-books in law, business, scientific and technical, medical, and social science and humanities. It found that, although the book market as a whole has taken its lumps due to declining print sales, e-books have greater appeal with library customers, which has led publishers to reinvest in their collections.

Individual print book sales, long a mainstay in medicine and nursing textbooks, are being supplanted by applications on tablets and mobile phones, electronic references and other online services. Libraries are increasingly using their book budgets to buy digital collections rather than individual titles. Researchers swoon for enriched content that can be searched en masse.

The new landscape is messy. It is not always clear whether content is being delivered as an online service or an e-book, but digital delivery has breathed new life into monographs, extending their life and attracting investment from major publishers. Encyclopedias and major reference works as e-books form the core of major content delivery services in law and across the scholarly and professional spectrum.

Scholarly and professional books as a whole still face steep challenges. Academic library budgets are under pressure, which has hurt books particularly hard after decades losing budget battles to journals and databases. Law school enrollments are declining in the large, rich U.S. market. Print sales and total sales are down and these trends can be expected to continue.

Scholarly & Professional E-Book Publishing 2018-2022 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 competitors' performance is projected through 2018. Scholarly and professional market categories are projected through 2022. The report also discusses trends, challenges, pricing models, usage, major e-book publishers, aggregators and platform providers.

About Simba Information:
Simba Information is widely recognized as the authority for market intelligence in the media and publishing industries. Its extensive information network delivers top quality, independent perspectives on the people, events and alliances shaping the industry. Simba routinely assists clients and the press with publishing and media industry analysis. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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SOURCE Simba Information