Archive for the ‘ebook sales figures’ tag
James Patterson triples his ebook sales record in 11 months no comments
Hachette Book Group announced today that bestselling author James Patterson has now sold over three million ebooks. This comes just 11 months after Patterson became the first novelist to sell more than one million ebooks in July of last year.
David Young, CEO of Hachette Book Group, said, "James Patterson thrills and entertains readers, across all formats and all ages. To surge from 1 to 3 million ebooks sold in such a short period is extraordinary. This growth indicates that Patterson is maximizing the new ways digital can connect him with his readers, be it through ebooks, his major online presence, or the Patterson app."
That major online presence includes the over 4 million visitors a year to JamesPatterson.com and Patterson’s 1.6 million-plus Facebook friends (numbers which grow daily by the thousands). The James Patterson app for iPad/iPhone has been downloaded close to 14,000 times, with 80 percent of Patterson’s app audience actively updated and engaged in the app’s content and features. In addition to this audience, there are also hundreds of thousands of followers on book-specific Facebook pages for Patterson’s young readers series such as Witch & Wizard and Maximum Ride. There is a dedicated website, an app, and interactive games for Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, Patterson’s latest title for young readers launching on June 27.
Patterson was the second author to become a member of the Kindle Million Club (after Stieg Larsson) at the end of October, 2010.
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Kindle books now outselling pbooks at Amazon no comments
Around the beginning of this year Amazon said that Kindle books had begun outselling hardcover books. Today the company announced that Kindle books have now overtaken paperback book sales as well.
From the press release:
Recent milestones for Kindle include:
- Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
- So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon’s print book sales, have resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s U.S. books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital. Free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.
- In the five weeks since its introduction, Kindle with Special Offers for only $114 is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family in the U.S.
- Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010.
- Less than one year after introducing the UK Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, even as hardcover sales continue to grow. Since April 1, Amazon.co.uk customers are purchasing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than 2 to 1.
The Kindle Store now contains more than 950,000 books.
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eBook sales for February bright spot in otherwise gloomy book sales report no comments
The Association of American Publishers has released book sales figures for February 2011. Digital content (ebooks and downloaded audiobooks) continue to do well while traditional book sales fell.
According to the data submitted to the AAP by participating publishers, ebook sales for February were $90.3 million, up 202.3 percent over February 2010. Downloaded audiobook sales were $6.9 million — an increase of 36.8 percent year over year.
Meanwhile, pbooks didn’t fare as well. Combined adult trade categories (Hardcover, Paperback and Mass Market) sales were $156.8 million, down by 34.4 percent. Children’s and Young Adult combined sales were $58.5 million, down 16.1 percent from February 2010.
The only category of pbooks to see an increase in sales was that of Religious books, which was up by 5.5 percent over the previous February.
Year to date (January and February) ebook sales are up 169.4 percent over 2010.
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eBook sales continue growth surge in January, 2011 no comments
The Association of American Publishers has released its January 2011 sales figures based on information from contributing publishers.
In a month that saw sales in every pbook category except Religious (up 5.6 percent from the previous year) and Professional and Scholarly (up 1.3 percent) fall over the previous January, ebook sales were up 115.8 percent year over year. There were a lot of empty ereaders sold over the holidays that needed filling.
January 2010 saw ebook sales increase 261.2 percent over January 2009 — so this year’s growth, while still strong, is nowhere near as dramatic as we saw last year. One reason for this might be that ebooks are more expensive now than they were at the beginning of last year — before Apple and five of the largest publishers initiated the agency model. eBooks are also less of a novelty now, and this might be a contributing factor as well. Perhaps earlier adaptors were more apt to stock their virtual library shelves with more ebooks than they could read. I reached a backlog of 60-70 books on my ereaders before I started putting titles I wanted but did not have time for in my Wish List rather than the shopping cart.
Downloaded audiobooks also continue to grow in popularity — up 8.8 percent over the previous year.
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November book sales no comments
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has released book sales figures for November, 2010.
Book sales as tracked by AAP were up 5.1 percent over the prior year and 3.5 percent year to date. Total book sales for November were $852 million.
Sales of ebooks in November were $46.6 million. This is up a little less than 15 percent from the prior month of October, but represents a year-to-date increase of 165.6 percent and is 129.7 percent over ebook sales for the previous November.
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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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eBook Sales for Q3 Looking Good no comments
The International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers have released their numbers for wholesale ebook sales revenue in the US for August, 2010.
eBook sales for August were $39 million. This is down slightly from the prior month’s sales of $40.8 million, but the first two months of Q3 combined sales of $79.8 million come pretty close to matching the entire Q2 sales of $88.7 million.
Q3 is on track, from what we can see so far, to show a sales increase of around 30 percent sequentially over Q2 and a whopping 250 percent increase over Q3 of 2009. Of course, we won’t know the sales figures for September, the final month of Q3, until next month. But right now it is looking like ebook sales have resumed their steep upward momentum after a brief rest in Q1.
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eReader & Tablet News – 9/20/2010 no comments
According to Digitimes, Pegatron will be helping to build HTC’s Android tablet. Some of the specs of the tablet are mentioned as well. It will be based on the Tegra 2 from Nvidia, will have a multi-touch display with 1280 x 720 resolution and will come with a 32GB SSD. Digitimes says that the price of the tablet is estimated to be US $789. I would expect a tablet from HTC to be available at a subsidized price through wireless carriers.
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Google Docs coming to iPad? From the Google blog today:
…today we demonstrated new mobile editing capabilities for Google Docs on the Android platform and the iPad. In the next few weeks, co-workers around the world will soon be able to co-edit files simultaneously from an even wider array of devices.
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In the second quarter of 2010 wholesale ebook sales saw a small decline over the previous quarter ($88.7 million vs $91 million), though sales on a year over year basis were still way up. The third quarter appears to be resuming surging growth rates again — ebook sales in July, 2010 were $40.8 million, almost half of the entire previous quarter’s sales.
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There was an interesting post on the Notion Ink blog over the weekend about some of the choices involved in designing the Notion Ink Adam Pixel Qi tablet.
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Amazon has made available another beta release software update for the Kindle 3. Version 3.0.2 is said to include web browser and general performance improvements. If you want to try it out, you can download the patch from the Kindle 3 Software Update page.
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June eBook Sales UP Over 200 Percent YTD no comments
I reported yesterday that ebook sales were a bit less in the second quarter than the first quarter. This is not really surprising as the first quarter saw a huge spike in ebook sales as all of those new ereaders sold over the holidays got filled up with new ebooks. After such a huge jump in the prior quarter it is perhaps even a little surprising that the second quarter sales were only 2.5 percent less. Perhaps the launch of the iPad at the beginning of the second quarter had something to do with that.
At any rate, the Association of American Publishers today released their numbers for publisher’s book sales for the month of June. Overall, book sales were up by 10.6 percent over last June, and 11.4 percent year-to-date.
Sales of ebooks in June were up 204.2 percent year-to-date, and 118.9 percent higher than last June. Even though ebook sales continue to skyrocket as more and more readers switch to digital books, do keep in mind that ebooks still make up only a small portion of overall book sales (just under $30 million out of $1.1 billion total book sales).
Downloaded audiobooks also continue to gain ground – sales were up 32.8 percent over last year and 34.3 percent year-to-date. This is probably coming in large part at the expense of physical audiobooks, whose sales fell by 35.9 percent over last June and are down 3.6 percent for the year.
Higher education publishing sales also saw dramatic increases both over last June (up 35.2 percent) and year-to-date (27.4 percent). No doubt this is due to the economy, as the retrenched retrain.
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eBook Sales Down Slightly in Second Quarter no comments
Sales of ebooks in the second quarter of 2010 retreated a bit after the huge spike in the first quarter.
The International Digital Publishing Forum reports that US wholesale trade ebook sales in Q2 were $88,700,000; down about 2.5 percent from $91,000,000 in sales reported for Q1. This comes after Q1 wholesale revenue surged over 60 percent above that of Q4 2009.
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