The Bookseller elicited some 2013 ebook sales information from the UK’s five largest trade publishers. The article shares only partial data points, but it seems to reflect what we have seen more clearly in data from a much larger group of publishers in the US — that growth in marketwide ebook sales in revenues has slowed considerably. (Also note that in the US, the AAP consistently measures publisher sales in dollars only, not units.) For these UK publishers, ebook unit growth remains stronger than revenue growth. The Bookseller shows unit sales at Penguin Random UK; Hachette UK; Harper UK; Pan […]
eNews
The Truth About 2013’s Top 100 Books: Not A Single, Self-Published Title
In today’s fragmented world of incomplete sales data — largely because we do not have any public disclosure of ebook unit sales on a title-level basis — USA Today’s annual list of the top 100 bestsellers performs a more important function than ever. That’s because they are the only compiler of bestseller lists to issue an annual chart that combines both ebook and print sales data from most major sellers. More particularly, their dataset includes Kindle sales but puts them in the context of the overall market, so you can differentiate between the storyline Amazon popularizes about what’s selling in […]
Pew Survey Rise In Digital Reading, But Print Remains Robust
Pew’s latest survey on digital reading habits in America, released Thursday, points to a rise in e-reading but not necessarily at the expense of print. Surveying 1005 adults over a three-day period earlier this month, Pew found that 28 percent of respondents had read an ebook in 2013, up from 23 percent the previous year. Of those surveyed, 76 percent of American adults ages 18 and older said that they read at least one book in the past year. (The average number was 12 books annually; the mean was 5 books.) Interestingly, Pew found that the highest percentage of those […]
Simon & Schuster Expands Library eBook Pilot; Guinness Moves to Macmillan
Simon & Schuster’s small pilot program for digital library lending is expanding to add 15 public libraries served by OverDrive. As with the initial efforts at New York City libraries, S&S will make available its full catalog of ebooks, offering unlimited checkouts for a year on a one copy/one user basis. The company has said previously that their library pricing is “a little bit more” than their ebook list prices. “We are pleased to expand our eBook distribution in libraries through this pilot with OverDrive,” Simon & Schuster vp, global ebook market development and strategy Doug Stambaugh said in the […]
DBW Survey Points to Author Dissatisfaction With Traditional and Self-Publishing
Having already offered a sneak peek at some of the results, CUNY professor Dana Beth Weinberg presented some additional data and analysis of the Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest author survey, which focused on the advantages and disadvantages of traditional publishing and self-publishing. While the survey pointed to some obvious conclusions — namely that “authors in general do not seem overly pleased with their publishing experiences, whether with traditional publishing or self-publishing — it offered up some interesting data points about preference, such as 24.1 percent of traditionally published surveyed authors being “very satisfied” with the pricing of their […]
The “Bezosologists” At DBW
Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter and author of The Everything Store Brad Stone opened Wednesday morning’s Digital Book World sessions focused on Amazon. “In a way, this is a room full of Bezosologists; we all have to be.” Stone spoke in particular to the company’s vast ambition and persistence: “The one constant is Amazon’s 20-year history is that it does not give up…and can be fairly ruthless and self-absorbed in how it constantly tries to disrupt the existing order.” He referred to “the notorious one-star review of my book that was heard round the world,” in which “MacKenzie Bezos took issue with […]