A Merry Christmas for ebook and ereader sellers – Somewhat less merry for their customers 1 comment
By all accounts this was a very jolly holiday for ebook and ereader makers and sellers, and not just at Amazon where the Kindle 3 became the company’s bestselling product ever.
Kobo had a very good Christmas. Its new customers who were trying to download ebooks from its overloaded servers or activate their new ereaders on Christmas day less so.
Kobo says that it saw a 50X increase in purchases from last years holiday weekend.
“Earlier this month we predicted that Christmas would be a record breaker for Kobo, and we have exceeded our expectations driving several ebook downloads per second since Christmas Eve, or an equivalent number hardcover books stacked as high as 50 Empire State Buildings,” said Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo. “I would like to thank our customers for choosing Kobo to start building their digital library this Christmas. Our success this holiday season is a pre-cursor to a New Year with people reading more than ever thanks to eBooks and Kobo.”
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Barnes & Noble also saw its servers crash and burn again this Christmas. You would think that after dealing with the same issues last year B&N might want to get it right this time. I downloaded an ebook to my Nook Color early afternoon on Christmas Day with no noticeable delay, although the website was very slow. On Sunday I could not even get through to the website. Many new Nook owners could not activate their new ereaders and ebook purchases were not showing up in their libraries. Of course B&N’s CS department was totally overwhelmed as well.
This is really inexcusable, especially after B&N’s big fail last Christmas. The company is struggling and you would think that it would want to be able to capture every dollar of revenue possible rather than loosing sales and creating more disgruntled customers.
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Random House says that Dec. 25 and 26 were its two biggest ebook sales days ever. The publishing house saw its ebook sales increase by 300 percent over last year.
Of Course, it doesn’t hurt that Random house does have a number of bestselling titles. The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, The Confession by John Grisham, Decision Points by George Bush, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak all did very well. Random House also saw a significant increase in ebook versions of children’s picture books.
"We are delighted by the volume of consumers flocking to Random House books across all our e-retailers, and not just to our best-selling titles which are clearly as popular in e as they are in print. Consumers are also using their e-reading devices to discover titles deeper in our list, including David Nicholls’s ONE DAY, George R. R. Martin’s A GAME OF THRONES and Max Brooks’ WORLD WAR Z." says Madeline McIntosh, President of Sales, Digital and Operations, Random House, Inc.
Currently Random House has more than 17,000 of its front and backlist titles available in ebook format.
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[...] past Christmas was supposed to be the season of the e-reader, and Random House says that Dec. 25 and 26 were its two biggest ebook sales days ever. I certainly helped make it a good year for Kindle when I requested one for myself from Santa [...]