Amazon well-exceeded analysts expectations, reporting third quarter earnings about 40 percent higher than predicted. And the company thanked Kindle, in their traditionally non-specific way: “Kindle has become the #1 bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars – not just in our electronics store but across all product categories on Amazon.” Earlier in the day, they also announced a Kindle for PC application to allow reading on computers. Sales rose 28 percent (including the incorporation of Zappos) to $5.45 billion for the quarter, as net income rose 68 percent to $199. North American media sales, which had unexpectedly stalled last […]
ABA Asks Justice to Look at Bookseling Price Wars
The board of the ABA has written to the Department of Justice, asking for a meeting to the discuss the deep-discounting of high profile books and suggesting that it “constitutes illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers…. We believe that Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target are using these predatory pricing practices to attempt to win control of the market for hardcover bestsellers.” They blame Amazon for starting it all with ebooks, and note “we believe the loss-leader pricing of digital content also bears scrutiny.” Beyond that, the letter does not set any legal basis […]
WSJ Bestsellers Now Based on Bookscan Data
As of today, Nielsen Bookscan will supply data for three weekly book charts for the Wall Street Journal – Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Non-fiction and Business – to run on Fridays, though they will not add unit sales data. The WSJ is the second paper to adopt Bookscan as its bestseller data provider (the Washington Post was the first.) Bookscan will also create additional, customized charts for WSJ.com around specific genres – this week it’s hardcover romance.WSJ Bestseller List Page
Friday's E-News Roundup
In the UK, a survey of heavy book-buying habits conducted by Book Marketing Limited and Lovereading demonstrated that while 56% of the approximately 1,300 respondents use the Internet to find out about books, social networks were less useful as a recommendation tool – only 34% found social networks as a whole to be helpful, and Twitter even less so (at 17%). The figures contrast with author and retailer websites, which 83% found “useful” when taken in total. (Of course, when Facebook now allegedly accounts for 1 in 4 pageviews, one could argue about what the definition of a website is […]
Stephen King eBook Release Strategy Follows the Palin Model
Scribner disclosed yesterday that they will issue an ebook version of Stephen King’s forthcoming new hardcover UNDER THE DOME, set for hardcover publication on November 10 at $35.00, on Sunday, December 24. Spokesman Adam Rothberg says, “Given the current state of the marketplace and trends in digital book pricing, we believe that this is the most appropriate publishing sequence for this particular 1088 page work of fiction.” Stephen King echoes the last-month pre-price-war strategy of “we’re doing it to help the bookstores,” though at least he recognizes the irony. He tells the WSJ, “I never thought we’d see people preordering […]
E-Stats and More
Amazon has realized it was silly in a competitive world to offer international Kindle for $20 more, while keeping US-only Kindle going. So now the have reduced the price on the international model to $259, and will no longer sell the US-only model. Buyers who already paid more are being issued $20 reunfds. Separately, Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener confirms the obvious–that SuperKindle will acquire the same international capability “sometime next year.” Meanwhile, the promised offers bundling SuperKindle with newspaper subscriptions are just beginning–but it’s hard to see the value proposition for customers. In the Washington Post’s trial offer, SuperK is […]