There is a new entrant in field offering ebook subscriptions for kids, Epic!, which targets kids 12 and under with an app that offers unlimited reading for $9.99 a month (starting with a one-month free trial). They stream the books rather than download them, and the company says participating publishers include Simon & Schuster, Open Road, Lerner, Kids Can Press and others providing “thousands” of titles. Sample screens show books including Olivia; Click, Clack, Moo; and Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs. The company says it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Menlo Ventures, Webb Investment Network, Innovation Endeavors, Maven Ventures, Morado […]
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Abrams Announces eBooks for Libraries
At the ALA meeting in Philadelphia, Abrams announced that their frontlist ebooks are now available for libraries to purchase and lend, through the established vendors. Each “sale” activates the ebook for a year of lending, on the one-copy/one-user model. Abrams says they are selling to libraries at their standard digital list price. They are also offering “a full catalog of backlist” titles, so the program includes the Diary of Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney. Abrams ceo Michael Jacobs says in the announcement, “We’ve been eager to fulfill library requests for both our frontlist and backlist e-books and are thrilled […]
eBook Sales Grew Less for Biggest UK Publishers, Too
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 […]
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 […]