The Bookseller obtained 2012 unit sale data on ebooks from six of the UK’s largest publishers, leading them to postulate that the total British ebook market comprised £235 million in publisher sales last year. (If their estimate is correct, it would mean that the top publishers have a much smaller share of ebook market in the UK than the US.) Reported to them by publishers (akin to AAP sales reports), Random House sold 11.2 million ebook units; Hachette 8.7 million; Harper UK 7.2 million, and Pan Macmillan 4.5 million. Some of those units were driven by the deep-discount 20-pence promotional […]
Industry Statistics
ABA Sales Softened In Second Half; UK eSales Still Lag US Considerably
As a group, ABA bookstores had a good year in 2012–but what’s implied in this BTW story is more significant than the stated statistics, ratifying our “story we can’t report” from yesterday. The ABA provides another indication that, despite happy anecdotal holiday sales reports,holiday book sales were soft, providing a soft ending to the year as early blockbusters (Hunger Games; Fifty Shades; etc.) gave way to a holiday season with few dominant, breakout books and a cooling off of the ebook market. (Barnes & Noble’s “core” non-Nook-related bookstores sales fell 3.1 percent during the holiday sales period.) What the ABA […]
The Year In Deals: 2012
It’s time for our annual look at trends in dealmaking from the previous, based as usual on reports to Publishers Marketplace. Which comes with the usual qualifiers: PM deal reports represent only a portion of activity in the marketplace, and characterizations of deal size in particular are dependent upon disclosure from the parties involved. We infer relatively consistent habits over time from our community, and the PM dataset of deals is the only such resource robust enough to analyze over time. To us, the granular year-to-year changes are more indicative than anything else. Once again, total recorded deal volume increased, […]
Print Sales Fall Over 9 Percent In US, 3.4 Percent In UK
US print book sales as tracked by Nielsen BookScan fell 9.3 percent in units for 2012. The biggest decline came from the smallest format segment, mass market books, where unit sales fell 20.5 percent. Trade paperbacks weakened more than hardcovers during the year. (Nielsen BookScan does not currently track US ebook sales.) In the UK, Nielsen BookScan’s data shows consumer expenditures on physical books fell 4.6 percent for the year, to £1.514, with unit sales declining 3.4 percent to 202 million books. With 10.6 million print copies sold during the year, EL James accounted for one out of every 20 […]
Nielsen BookScan Expands to Include Walmart Data
Nielsen BookScan US announced that they are incorporating sales data from what has been the largest elusive seller of physical books in the US. Beginning with the first week of January 2013, point-of-sale data for printed books sold at over 4,000 Walmart locations across the U.S. and Puerto Rico will be included in the service’s sales database. BookScan estimates that with the new data, they will account for over 80 percent of the US retail print book market. “Greater accuracy of information and insight into book consumers is what all BookScan clients want, and adding Walmart data provides a big […]
As In June, Trade Paperbacks and eBooks Carry the Trade
The AAP reported sales for July from the nearly 1,200 publishers they track. Overall net trade sales of $522.5 million were up 12 percent, with all of the gains and then some coming from trade paperbacks and adult–very adult–ebooks, still led by the remarkable 50 Shades trilogy. July’s trade total was $16.4 million lower than in June. Children’s sales, boosted earlier in the year by release of the first Hunger Games movies, registered $98.1 million–down 9.5 percent compared to $108.4 million a year ago. eBook sales were almost the same as in June, at $137.8 million, up 62 percent versus […]