Pew’s latest survey on digital reading habits in America, released Thursday, points to a rise in e-reading but not necessarily at the expense of print. Surveying 1005 adults over a three-day period earlier this month, Pew found that 28 percent of respondents had read an ebook in 2013, up from 23 percent the previous year. Of those surveyed, 76 percent of American adults ages 18 and older said that they read at least one book in the past year. (The average number was 12 books annually; the mean was 5 books.) Interestingly, Pew found that the highest percentage of those […]
Statistics
Nielsen’s 2013 Bestsellers Topped By O’Reilly, Brown and Kinney
Nielsen Bookscan’s lists of the bestselling books for 2013 were published at the end of last week, the trade’s comprehensive account of print book sales across what the company estimates is at least 80 percent of the print market. (There is still no public tracking service for ebook sales.) But direct comparisons about changes in print sales for the year are hard, because Bookscan expanded its data pool for 2013 by adding Wal-Mart sales. So total sales tracked expanded as Wal-Mart added between 5 and 10 percent to the total data pool. For year-over-year comparisons, there is the Bookscan’s subsection […]
Bowker Sells Research, Stats and eCommerce Lines to Nielsen
Bowker has reached an agreement to sell their business intelligence and commerce solutions product to Nielsen, with a closing expected in four to eight weeks. After the sale, Bowker will focus on their core identifier services and library services. Nielsen is acquiring the consumer research lines, which have operated in both the US and UK (comprising the former Book Marketing Limited, which Bowker acquired in 2012), the PubTrack Digital line, and the ecommerce tools. As Nielsen Books president Jonathan Nowell tells us, the companies have “always been two great complementary businesses” that are now coming together. “We’re looking forward to being able […]
People and More
Greg Stadnyk has joined Little, Brown Children’s as associate art director. He was at Penguin Children’s. Iris Blasi has been named marketing director, senior editor at Pegasus Books, effective August 12. She was formerly marketing manager at Open Road Integrated Media. Longtime Amazon employee Sarah Jane Gunter, who has worked most recently in the company’s Luxembourg and Paris offices, will become publisher of the Amazon Crossing imprint on September 1. As the company explains in a job listing, they are starting a branch of Crossing in Germany (Amazon Crossing DE), “to establish new foreign authors in Germany.” The Book Industry […]
AAP Trade Sales Fall Some In February, Further In March
The AAP released catch-up Stat Shot statistics from February and March that show overall trade sales declining from one month to the next through the first quarter of 2013, mostly due to the absence of hits to take the place of the Hunger Games trilogy a year ago. February trade sales (from a pool of almost 1,200 reporting publishers across all sectors) declined 6 percent, to $421 million; March trade sales fell further, by 8.6 percent, to $449 million. (January sales, as previously reported, had been down by just $3 million.) Those comparisons will likely fall again in comparison to […]
Adult Hardcover and Trade Gains Can’t Overcome Big Children’s/YA Drops in AAP’s January Report
The AAP reported StatShot monthly sales statistics for January. Total trade sales of $455.7 million were virtually flat compared to the same month a year ago (down just $3.2 million), though adult sales of $355.4 million were up 8.4 percent from the same point last year thanks to gains in trade paperbacks (up 10.6 percent) and hardcovers (up 8.3 perecent). Adult ebook sales of $110.1 million were up only 10.1 percent compared to January 2012, but were just $7 million off the month’s reported trade paperback sales, now comprising the second-largest segment for adult books. The small ebook increase also […]