Apple still hasn’t said a word about sales of ebooks, but they have revised their tabulation of ebooks downloaded worldwide. In March they were still saying 100 million downloads; now they are saying 130 million.
Sales
eNews: Collins and Child Pass the Million Mark; Penzler Starts Mysterious Press eBooks
Suzanne Collins and Lee Child are the newest authors to sell over a million Kindle editions of their works. Collins is the first children’s author to achieve the milestone. They join Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts and Charlaine Harris. Release Otto Penzler intends to publish 250 ebooks through a new MysteriousPress.com venture, primarily reissues of classic mysteries not yet available electronically. The line will also publish one new title a month, including a novella by James Grady, a follow-up to Six Days of the Condor. MysteriousPress.com will use Open Road for distribution and marketing, Crain’s NY reports. Crains
eNews: Stats on Google, Kobo and James Patterson; Borders Transitions; Unbound’s Deal; and More
Making the rounds electronically now (we missed it when posted a week ago), Google eBooks said their apps for iOS, Android and Chrome “have exceeded 2.5 million” installs since December. In contrast, Kobo said in early May they were “close to 4 million users” with adoption accelerating. (They went from 2 million users to 3 million in somewhere between 60 and 90 days.) Google There are varying degrees of consternation online based on whether or not people were paying attention previously, but as announced, Borders is transitioning their branded ebook line–which was already powered by Kobo–over to the Kobo brand. […]
As Expected, eBooks Slide to 17 Percent of Sales In March As Trade Rebounds, But E Is Now Amazon’s Top Format
Monthly ebook sales as measured by the AAP from 14 reporting publishers ebbed in March–which we were expecting–more or less on par with the second-biggest ebook sales month on record (January 2011), at $69 million. That puts ebooks behind adult trade hardcover and trade paperbacks for the month, and they comprised less than 17 percent of all trade sales for March. Why was a pullback from February’s $90.3 million expected? For starters, March is when Random House moved to the agency model, which means their ebook receipts should have declined, all things being equal. Just as important, recent quarterly earnings […]
Random UK Goes Agency; Ed Victor Launches Publisher; and More eNews
There is a lot of ebook news from the UK, today. Random House UK has adopted the agency model, following a similar move at the beginning of March in the US. As of today, the company’s approximately 6,000 ebook titles are available for sale through Apple’s iBookstore in the UK as a result. Random UK spokesperson Maureen Corish says “We were the only major English language trade publisher not to have our ebooks on sale via the iBookstore, so today’s announcement sees us forging a new commercial relationship as part of our commitment to increasing consumer choice and making our […]
Some Numbers of Self-Published eBooks
The Washington Post has a piece on the ebook self-publishing “gold rush,” but they include some balancing facts as well. For all the stories of impressive success, Smashwords founder Mark Coker says, “We have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don’t sell a single book.” Amazon’s Jeff Belle concurs: “There are a lot of books, even low-priced, on Kindle that are not selling at all.” Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble says PubIt, launched in October, features 14,500 authors and 90,000 titles (some of which come from Smashwords and others like […]