Harper Results Are Soft In the US, Strong In the UK, As eBooks Stay At 10% Worldwide

PublishersLunch

News Corp.reported second quarter sales after the close of the market Wednesday. As inthe past, the performance of HarperCollins is too modest to merit any mentionin the earnings release.
In thepublishing segment, focused on newspapers, sales fell 9 percent and operatingincome dropped by 43 percent, blamed on "lower advertising revenues at theAustralian newspapers and the integrated marketing services business" aswell as the closure of The News of the World.
In a briefstatement, Harper said their best-performing units were Harper UK (publisherthere of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones books) and Zondervan "whichhad strong increases over the same quarter in the prior year." The largestunit, Harper US, as well as other international units "had challengingcomparisons to the prior year."
Mostsurprising, given the scant level of disclosure now, is that Harper says printproduct during the quarter (which ended December 31) comprised a big 90 percentof revenues worldwide, leaving only 10 percent for digital and audio.
Within thatoverall 10 percent figure was Harper UK's increasing ebook gains, nowcomprising 20 percent of the division's trade revenues for the period,according to ceo Victoria Barnsley's letter to staff. (Per longstandingtradition, Barnsley declares another "fantastic" quarter.) That 20percent is way ahead of reporting UK peers, and well ahead of the 11% ebooksales reported last quarter, and the sub-10% ebook sales noted in the quarterbefore that. The Bookseller says that "Nielsen BookScan figures showHarper UK print revenues were up 2 percent year on year in the last quarter of2011."
Worldwide,Harper has reported a variety of measures of digital sales in the past. In thelast quarter, they disclosed print sales through "bricks and mortarretail" only, which were 77 percent worldwide and 71 percent in the US.(Message: most of our sales are still outside of Amazon.)

The quarter before that, the end oftheir fiscal year last summer, ebooks alone were 12 percent of sales in the US forthe entire year, but no quarterly measure was provided. In the third quarter ofthe prior year, they did report actual ebook sales--which were 19 percent inthe US, and 11 percent worldwide, or close to the level reported now.