Wood-containing book paper captures market shares
Holmen Paper announced that according to a book study it recently conducted, consumption of wood-containing book paper has grown by some 30 percent since 2010.
"Publishers' consumption of wood-containing paper has risen since we conducted the corresponding survey four years ago. The main advances have come at the cost of wood-free grades," said Agnes Nylund, business intelligence manager at Holmen Paper.
The study involved 24 leading European book publishers and printing firms, which compbined cover 55 percent of the Western European market.
Holmen said that although the number of hardback books is falling, and is expected to continue to fall over the next 3-5 years, the trend for paperbacks (Holmen's core market) is forecast to remain stable over the same period.
Although the growth of e-books continues, and will continue in the long term, that growth hasn't been, and will not be, all at the expense of traditional paper-based books.
"And how big a threat are e-books"
“E-books are expected to continue growing in the long term. Commentators believe that e-books have the potential to take a 20–30 per cent share of the total book market, compared with today’s 3–5 per cent explains Agnes Nylund, who also stresses that the rise of the e-book is not happening at the cost of printed books, whose numbers are not declining at the same rate as e-book growth.