Little, Brown Children’s says that it has sold over a million copies of Stephenie Meyer’s novella A THE SHORT SECOND LIFE OF BREE TANNER since its release on June 5–making it “the biggest selling new book of the year so far.” In other publisher announcements, Bantam will release Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s THE GRAND DESIGN on September 7.
Industry Statistics
eBook Numbers
We generally do not report on the AAP’s monthly numbers (or the Census Bureau’s monthly bookstore numbers) because they are so incomplete and idiosyncratic that they produce more confusion than clarity as far as we are concerned. (It leads to disconnects like today’s pairing from Shelf Awareness:) “AAP: April Sales Increase, Big Gain for Hardcovers”“Bookstore Sales Slip 5.1% in April, Flat for Year” But with the thirst for ebook data and general confusion about the changing landscape of business terms, lots of outlets are seizing on the monthly AAP ebook numbers. Year-on-year numbers are still increasing–April was up 127 percent […]
Bezos Tells Shareholders No Color Screen Soon
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 […]
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 […]