Safari Books Online acquired PubFactory, which builds systems for delivering books, videos, reference, and other content on the web, from RDW Group’s iFactory division for an undisclosed sum. The deal closed on Decmeber 31, 2012. Under the agreement, Safari Books Online now owns the proprietary software developed by iFactory, which is used to develop scalable and semantically rich electronic libraries for publishers. “For some time now, we’ve admired the PubFactory team’s expertise in building powerful web-based systems for delivering mixed content like books, videos, journals, and reference databases. Their platform will be a robust complement to our growing stable of […]
eNews
Nook Sales Fall 12.6 Percent Over Holidays, As Core BN Store Sales Also Declined
Barnes & Noble followed up their pre-New Year’s sales warning with a fuller holiday sales report: Same-store sales at the BN superstores and BN.com fell 8.2 percent (and 10.9 percent overall), at $1.2 billion for the nine-week period. Much of the decline was due to weaker sales of Nook devices and accessories but even leaving that product line aside, “core” store sales still declined 3.1 percent compared to last year “due to lower bookstore traffic.” (A core decline had been forecast, however, in the low-to-mid single digits, and the company said those sales “exceeded expectations.”) In the last quarter BN management […]
eNews: Smashwords Hits $15 Million and Adds EPUB, GoodReads Eyes Bookselling?, and iBookstore to Open In Japan
Inside of some long and boosterish year-end blog posts, Smashwords made a couple of announcements. The privately-owned ebook distributor “will do around $15 million in ebook sales in 2012.” In June 2012, founder Mark Coker had told Forbes he expected to double his 2011 gross to $12 million for the year. Since romance and erotica comprised almost 40 percent of sales in June, we infer that growth in those categories helped lift overall results. It’s also increasingly clear that Smashwords’ growth is linked to the international expansion of the iBookstore. “For the month of November 2012, sales of Smashwords-distributed titles […]
New Pew eReading Survey Shows eBook Reading Increases as Print Readership Declines
Pew Research’s latest e-reading survey, released Thursday, added still more context on various trends among those who read electronically in 2012. Of the over 2500 Americans aged 16 or older surveyed between October and November 2012, a little fewer than one-quarter (or 23 percent) reported that they have read an ebook in the past year, up from 16 percent in the previous year. According to the Pew survey, the likeliest ebook readers are those with college or graduate degrees (42 percent of those surveyed), those who live in households earning more than $75,000 (44 percent), and those whose ages fall […]
Pearson Invests $89.5 Million In Nook Media, After Disappointing Holiday
Nook Media–the entity formed in 2012 that owns Barnes & Noble’s Nook business and their college bookstores–has its second major strategic investor, joining Microsoft: As of December 21 Pearson agreed to invest $89.5 in cash for a 5 percent equity stake. The bookseller paired an announcement about that investment with a preview of holiday sales that indicates “results will be below expectations” and Nook in particular will not meet their previous projections for the fiscal year. Perhaps because of that performance, Pearson is buying in to Nook Media at essentially the same the valuation given to the company when Microsoft […]
Holiday Nook Promotion Includes Free eBook–In Stores Only
Barnes & Noble and Nook have a one-free ebook with purchase promotion that takes modest advantage of some of the discounting freedom available to retailers under Agency Lite (though a number of the titles on offer are from publishers who sell ebooks wholesale anyway). The program focuses on selling ebooks from BN stores–the only place the offer is valid–and giving ebooks as gifts. The idea is that you buy one of the designated 20 ebooks for yourself, and then you provide an email address (or get a gift receipt with a code) to send another of those 20 titles to […]