At Book Expo America last week, Nielsen svp global managing director Jonathan Stolper presented some data from across Nielsen’s tracking services, including — for the first time — ebook data from PubTrack Digital. Because of misunderstandings about how various industry data views are compiled, you may have encountered some confused or incorrect accounts of this new data elsewhere. PubTrack Digital reports actual unit ebook sales, in the same way that Bookscan reports actual unit print book sales. While Bookscan reports weekly — getting sales data direct from retailers — PubTrack Digital reports monthly, and gets sales on a delayed basis […]
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At HarperCollins Christian Books, Stephanie Newton has been promoted to marketing director, backlist, as part of an expanded focus on backlist titles at the company. Claire Ivett has been promoted to associate editor at Da Capo Lifelong Books. In Canada, Steve Osgoode has joined Joe Books as president. Previously he was director, digital products at HarperCollins Canada. Awards At an awards ceremony for the Audie Awards Thursday night, Mandela: An Audio History by Radio Diaries; narrated by Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Joe Richman (Highbridge) won the audiobook of the year award. The complete list of winners is here. Distribution […]
Briefs: HarperCollins Adds Titles to Shazam; Sierra Club Closes Book Imprints; and More
HarperCollins will be the exclusive global book partner for the launch of music recognition app Shazam‘s new visual recognition functionality. (Other newspaper and magazine partners include Condé Nast, Esquire, Time and the Wall Street Journal.) Starting immediately whenever Shazam users wave their mobile phone over any HarperCollins book or promotional content with the Shazam camera logo on it, they will instantly get taken to custom mobile experiences from HarperCollins, including exclusive content, author interviews, special offers, videos, playlists and more. Available and forthcoming titles in the program include Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman; Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph […]
Kobo Extends ABA Partnership With eRead Local Program
Kobo is adding a new component to its existing partnership with the American Booksellers Association with the impending launch of eRead Local, set to launch later this summer (the exact timing is still TBA.) Participating ABA members will receive $5 USD per new Kobo customer acquired, and each new customer creating a Kobo account through an affiliate ABA member will receive a $5 USD credit for use toward their first purchase of a Kobo eBook. ABA members who acquire 100 new customers will be entered for a chance to win an in-store event with a bestselling author, and those who […]
BookBub Raises Another $7 Million for Growth; Vook Rebrands As Pronoun; Pandora Buys Next Big Sound/Book
BookBub announced that they recently closed another financing round of $7 million in equity and debt financing. The capital comes from the same investors who provided a $3.8 million round a year ago (led by NextView Ventures and Founder Collective, joined by Avalon Ventures and Bloomberg Beta). Co-founder Josh Schanker says in the post they “decided to take additional capital to accelerate expansion.” He also indicates that they have added over 20 employees in the last year. In what looks to be the next of many pivots for Vook (and their acquired properties Byliner and Booklr), the company has announced “the formation […]
Kindle Unlimited Pool Grows But Per Book Fee Stays In Range
Amazon provided their monthly discretionary boost to the KDP fund that tells self-published authors — retroactively — how much they will be paid for ebooks borrowed through Kindle Unlimited. For April accounting, the pool totals $9.8 million, the highest monthly amount yet. But the fee per book borrowed through KU remains in the relatively low range, at $1.355 per read. (That translates into roughly 7.232 million borrows for the month.) For the 10 months since KU began, through April, Amazon has paid out approximately $67.3 million so far.