The AAP reported sales for December, with net trade shipments of $493 million down 3.5 percent from a year ago. Children’s/YA hardcover was the only print growth category for the month, up 12.3 percent, and per the year’s trend, mass market books declined the most, down 40 percent. eBook sales remained moderate, at $85 million the third-largest category after adult hardcover and adult paperback. Comprising 17.2 percent of overall trade sales, they did climb from $77.3 million in November though on a comparable basis, ebooks less than doubled compared to the same period a year ago (when they were $49.4 […]
Industry Statistics
AAP eBook Sales Nudge Back Up In November, As Children’s Hardcovers Shine
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 […]
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: 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 […]
The Year In Deals: 2011
After a positive response to our pre-Frankfurt deal analysis and charts, our webmaster built a sophisticated set of tools to let us analyze all the data locked inside our Deals database, the largest collection of deal data ever compiled. So now we can offer an assessment of the deal trends of 2011, and we can put those results in the context of a five-year pattern as well. The data shows that US book deal volume increased for the second straight year in 2011, at 5,211 transactions in all, up 5.4 percent overall (after a 7.7 percent gain in 2010). Nonfiction […]
Nicholls, Oliver and Pratchett Top UK 2011 Charts
The Guardian has printed their annual look at the Nielsen UK sales charts, this time with more depth and transparency than ever. The presentation includes downloadable files of the top 5,000 or so selling books and data about the leading genres across the market. We’ve simplified some of the highlights below, but you can get the full data here. As in the US, Nielsen only tracks print book sales in the UK and does not currently capture ebook data (though ebooks comprise somewhere between 8 to 10 percent of the UK market right now). Nielsen UK does capture nearly all […]