IDC has released the headline data from their fourth quarter tracking of shipments (not consumer sales) of media tablets and ereaders. They say that over 6 million ereaders shipped during the holiday quarter, over the twice the volume from the end of 2009, with a tabulation of 12.8 million ereaders shipped worldwide in 2010. IDC gives Kindle a 48 percent share for both the quarter and the year, comprising about 2.9 million units in the final quarter and 6.15 million units for 2010. Pandigital “edged out Barnes and Noble for the number 2 spot” in the last quarter, “although the […]
Sales
Bloomsbury USA’s eBook Sales Jump to 40 Percent
Though Bloomsbury reported results for 2010 this morning, the company’s biggest news come informally out of Bloomsbury USA, where according to executive Evan Schnittman ebook sales jumped to comprise 40 percent of net sales in January 2011, up from 15 percent in December 2010. (That’s consistent with a recent report from Sourcebooks, in which they said their January ebook sales also jumped to 35 percent of sales.) Rising ebook sales and a Booker winner on the list helped Bloomsbury USA reach its “best performance ever,” with sales of 19.1 million pounds–up just 1.6 percent–but profit of 1.3 million pounds, up […]
eNews: PubIt Stats, BookRenter Funding, O’Reilly Stats
Barnes & Noble says that they have enrolled “more than 11,000 independent publishers and authors” in the self epublishing PubIt! program in four months, comprising 65,000 works. And they note that 35 PubIt! titles are currently among their top 200 ebooks. BN is also holding its first in-store event for PubIt! authors in their Santa Monica store (though the company never really leveraged their stores on behalf of iUniverse in the past).Release VCs still love online textbook rental companies. BookRenter has raised another $40 million in financing, a substantial boost on top of the $20 million raised previously. TechCrunch says […]
People, Awards, and More
At Rizzoli, Susan Masry has been promoted to international sales manager, overseeing sales to Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America,,the Middle East, and South Africa, as well as Rizzoli’s domestic export accounts. Media and intellectual property lawyer Kevin Goering has joined Norwick & Schad, which has been renamed Norwick, Schad & Goering. In their third week of listing ebook bestsellers, the NYT has purged that self-published title we identified last week and–like USA Today–allowed Lisa Gardner’s 99-cent ebook to rise to No 1. (and No. 2 on the combined list). The LA Times announced nominees for its annual book prizes […]
More On eBook Bestsellers, and An Interesting Precedent
Continuing–and expanding on–the trend since Christmas, 19 of the top 50 titles on the USA Today bestseller list sold more units as ebooks than in print. And that was true for five of the top six titles. Among them, Lisa Gardner’s 99-cent ebook ALONE finally gets a ranking to match its position on etailers’ charts. Which will only spark further discussions among publishers about ebook bestseller strategies and standards. In a different taboo-breaker, you know how the big houses all declare they will never buy print rights only to a new book, while others have believed print buyers will emerge […]
AAP eBook Sales Reach New High in December, Finish Year at 8 Percent/$441 Million
The AAP reported sales from December for the limited set of reporting publishers they monitor, tabulating ebook sales from a dozen companies of $49.5 million for the month. Electronic books registered $441.3 million for the year among the reporting companies, compared to $166.9 million a year ago. When properly calculated, ebooks were just under 8 percent of net trade sales for the year. For December alone, ebooks comprised 9.5 percent of monitored sales. It was the highest monthly ebook sales number yet, outpacing the previous high from November of $46.6 million. Consistent with our analysis last month of figures for […]