With the Frankfurt Book Fair looming, we have compiled our semi-annual look at the state of dealmaking, this time bolstered by some very pretty charts. Visualizing our data should make it easier for readers to draw their own conclusions from the statistics, and it allows us to reveal more nuance to the figures as well. The first chart below looks at all US Publishers Marketplace deal reports from September. Deal volume among “comparable categories” continues to grow, up 7.5 percent over last year (when reports jumped almost 17 percent from the recession trough of 2009). But total deal volume is […]
Industry Statistics
Briefs: Amazon Lights a “Kindle Fire” Under Its Tablet; Quercus Sales Fall From Larsson Ebb; and More
Multiple reports (including this one from TechCrunch) indicate that Amazon’s tablet, which will be formally introduced at an event Wednesday morning, will be called the Kindle Fire, and will not be ready to ship until the second week of November. For the first six months of 2011, Quercus reported sales of 12 million pounds, down 20 percent from a year ago (largely due to a natural ebb in Stieg Larsson volume sales, which had boosted Quercus’s bottom line significantly for the past few years) though profits rose slightly to 3.4 million pounds during the same time frame. The cost of […]
Looking for Facts About Self-Published eBooks
With abundant stories of self-published success via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt and other outlets–and growing concerns as to whether self-epublishing opportunities and increased acquisitions by Amazon’s own imprints poses a challenge to established publishers–we made self-published ebooks the topic of our latest proprietary consumer survey. As with the insightful look at where Borders customers might take their book-buying dollars, the data was compiled exclusively for Publishers Lunch by Bowker PubTrack, through their regular online survey of book buyers. In this case, answers come only from the 11 percent of people surveyed who bought ebooks during the […]
New Book Stats Describe the Flat Trade In New Ways–Including $838 Million in 2010 eBooks
After a couple years of no industry-wide statistics and many years before that of poor, illusory numbers, the publishing industry is back on the road to measuring itself with the new BookStats, prepared jointly by the AAP and BISG, released in highlight form to trade media on Tuesday. All of the new numbers as you will read about them are modeled estimates rather than actual data–but they draw on data supplied by just under 2,000 publishers, and the methodology for extrapolating the estimates was far more careful and rational than the process used by the BISG alone for its annual […]
BAMM Picks Up Two More Waldenbooks Outlets
Books-a-Million has agreements with The Cafaro Company–whom we mentioned yesterday–to take over at least two more Waldenbooks locations that are being liquidated. One is in Monroe, MI and one is in St. Clairsville, OH. Both were on that “option” list of additional stores Books-a-Million was looking at when they initially bid for 30 Borders Group locations. So BAMM is now filling all five of the “option” stores, along with two other superstores, all managed by Cafaro. Cafaro spokesperson Joe Bell said the company has eight locations currently occupied by Borders Group and “of these, he said, most will become Books-A-Million […]
AAP May eBook Sales Nudge Up As Print Sales Take Another Hit
eBook sales reported by 15 companies to the AAP comprised $73.4 million for May, and accounted for 18.5 percent of all net trade sales for the month, consistent with the prior two months. eBooks were the second-largest trade format again, behind trade paperbacks. Between the rise of ebooks and the decline of Borders, overall trade sales suffered their biggest monthly drop so far this year, though, with the steepest falls in adult hardcover and adult mass markets. Down $52.9 million even with the gain in ebooks, overall trade sales of $398.3 declined almost 12 percent in the month. Here are […]