Amazon ceo Jeff Bezos told the audience at the company’s annual meeting that their strategy for competing with Apple is the company looks to surge past Kindle in devices on the market is to stay focused on “serious reading households.” That strategy is said to drive the excuse for not adding a kolor Kindle any time soon. “Bezos said it would be easy to add a color LCD screen to the Kindle, but that it provided an inferior reading experience to the reflective E Ink Corp. technology that the device currently uses. As for color reflective screens, Mr. Bezos said […]
Industry Statistics
AAP and BISG Will Finally Join Forces In Search of Improved Industry Stats
After years of compiling separate but equally incomplete publishing industry statistics, the AAP and Book Industry Study Group (BISG) have finally found common ground and will pool their resources in the future. Their goal is “to develop a new data model to track book publishing industry statistics and to dramatically improve our capacity to estimate the size of market sectors and theindustry as a whole.” Over the next few months the two organizations will interview and survey their members and other interested parties to refine their plan. Management Practices, Inc. which has collected data for the AAP for years, will […]
Stats: AAP and UK
We don’t put a lot of stock into the AAP’s sales estimates (a hybrid of Census data and reports from 86 AAP member publishers, both of which are incomplete data streams). But for those who like to follow them, today the organization published its 2009 sales estimates. Trade sales of $8.1 billion were “steady,” with adult hardcover rising 6.9 percent and adult paperbacks falling 5.2 percent. Mass market paperbacks totaled $1 billion, down 4 percent. By their count, ebook sales of $313 million–up 176 percent–overtook audio sales, which at $192 million were down 12.9 percent. Religious book sales fell 9 […]
BISG Surveys eBook Consumers
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has released headline results from their first survey of Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading, conducted among approximately 550 people from Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer panel who said they had purchased an ebook within the past year. Computers were still the top ereading “devices,” cited by 47 percent of respondents, followed by the Kindle at 32 percent and other ereaders at 10 percent. “Roughly one-fifth of survey respondents said they’ve stopped purchasing print books within the past 12 months in favor of acquiring the e-book editions.” One question asked how, for a favorite author, consumers would […]
Bookscan Adds to Data Pool
New for 2010, Nielsen Bookscan now includes point-of-sale data from BJ’s Wholesale Club (over 180 stores); Meijer (with 190 supercenters); and The Paradies Shops (with over 500 stores in more than 70 airports and hotels).
2009 By the Real Numbers: US Units Down 3 Percent, and UK Off Only 0.5 Percent
One good idea for the new year is to not be too influenced by the popular press and their facile pronouncements about the “failing publishing industry.” As Crain’s noted last week, in the US unit book sales as tracked by Nielsen Bookscan were down approximately 3 percent for the year (which was only a “surprise” if you hadn’t been paying attention to the real numbers throughout the year). The biggest weakness was in adult nonfiction, down 7 percent. Also bear in mind that ebook sales–not currently tracked by Bookscan–jumped from roughly 1 percent of the percent to approximately 4 percent […]