eBook sales as reported by a small but growing group of publishers to the AAP remained lower than their peaks earlier in the year in November, at $77.3 million up modestly from October’s reported $72.8 million. Overall, ebooks comprised 16 percent of trade sales, compared to 12.6 percent in October. The peak during 2011 was February, when high ebook numbers and low print shipments made digital 29.5 percent of the month’s reported sales. Further skewing the month-to-month and year-over-year comparisons, the number of publishers reporting ebook sales to the AAP keeps changing from month to month. For November, 8 more […]
Sales
eNews: ProPublica Expands eBook Line; Goodreads Drops Amazon API
Online investigative journalism site ProPublica is the latest publication to produce an expanded line of ebooks, now in a “digital publishing partnership” with Open Road. (The journalism organization issued four titles as Kindle Singles last spring.) The new line of ebooks, priced at $5 or less and available as of the end of February, will be based on previously published material in expanded form, including “Presidential Pardons” (a series that ran in the Washington Post) and “Post-Mortems,” an investigation of coroner and medical examiner offices ProPublica did in conjunction with NPR and Frontline. Each ebook will also include additional material […]
eNews: Another Textbook Reader (From Chegg); eBooks Are 28% of Sourcebooks’ Sales; Cemetery Dance’s Digital Subscription; and More
Taking advantage of interest around Apple’s press conference tomorrow, textbook rental company Chegg is wading into the morass of too many proprietary ereading platforms for students with yet another product. Their cloud-based eTextbook Reader is HTML5-based, developed by 3D3R, an engineering team recently acquired by Chegg. The app is currently optimized for iPads and computers, though the company says other platforms are on the way. Their product uses publisher-supplied PDFs, and the company says they have about 40,000 textbooks available from all of the major publishers. (The WSJ says Kno claims about 150,000 titles, with options to either purchase or […]
eNews: Amazon Trumpets Kindle Owners Lending Library; Plagiarized Titles Plague Kindle Store; and More
Amazon is delighted to declare “strong customer adoption” of the Kindle Owners Lending Library and oodles of money for participating Kindle Select (e.g. Kindle-exclusive) self-published authors. Interestingly, however, the extra money that Amazon claims participants received–“an incremental 26 percent in December”–is roughly equal to the proclaimed market share of No. 2 ebook player Nook, where Select authors and publishers can no longer sell. Which begs the question of whether participants are actually making more money in toto. Even the top 10 authors–whom Amazon says earned over $70,000–only got a 30 percent boost over their ebook sales with their lending library […]
eNews: eBooks Fill the USA Today Bestseller List; Patterson Sells Over 5 Million eBooks; and More
Heavy post-Christmas ebook buying is evident in USA Today’s latest bestseller list, published Thursday morning, on which ebook versions outsold print editions for 42 of the top 50 books. Below are the outliers that sold more in print (one of which, Wimpy Kid, is not available in ebook form). This time a year ago, USA Today suddenly showed 19 of the top 50 titles selling better as ebooks than in print; up until then, no more than two of their top 50 met that criterion. 11 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, Jeff Kinney 19 Inheritance, Christopher Paolini 23 […]
eNews: Kindle Has “Best Holiday Ever”; 100K Xmas Downloads for Harper UK; and More
Restating the obvious and continuing its tradition of trumpeting nonspecific success, Amazon announced that 2011 “was the best holiday ever for the Kindle family as customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers,” while Christmas day was the “biggest day ever” for Kindle book downloads. Building on their earlier press release, they say that “throughout December, customers purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices per week.” Despite straining to celebrate and overplay the success of KDP authors, the etailer admits that the top ebooks for the holiday sales period were The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins […]