The ebook market continues to grow as documented below. Sales of e-books continue to increase in each year increasing share against their hard copy counterparts.
Penguin Publishing
Penguin announced sales figures today for the year 2011. eBook sales were responsible for over 12% of the companies’ total sales and made them around 152 million dollars. Although sales for digital content seems to be increasing every year, it is still a drop in bucket for their print business. During the course of 2011 they made over 1.4 billion dollars in sales.
John Makinson is the Penguin chairman and CEO is quoted as saying: “The most turbulent book market that anyone can remember”, some of the strategies carried out by Penguin included:
- Using multiple book sellers
- Creating content which included media elements
Creating a new line of publications called ‘Penguin Shorts’ which are too short to be a novel and too long to be a magazine article (weren’t these called Novellas once!?)
Harper Collins
Harper Collins’ released sales figures are up 270% and a point in time snapshot of Christmas Day accounted for 100,000+ books downloaded on that one day. In the UK Harper Collins make up 20% of the total market share of e-books.
Bloomsbury Publishing
Bloomsbury announced an increase of 70% in 2011 and Nigel Newton, Bloomsbury’s chief executive commented that “eBook sales continue to grow at a rapid rate and we are well placed to take advantage of this seismic shift in the book publishing industry. Despite the economic headwinds we are confident that we have the right strategy in place as well as a very strong list of authors for the coming year”
Bloomsbury indicates that Genre fiction is particularly strong, including areas like historical, western, and science fiction. Bloomsbury is also likely to gain a greater foothold with the acquisition of Fairchild publishing who had 21% of their total sales from e-books. Fairchild generated $52.5 million in total sales.
Sources:
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/harper-collins-sees-270-growth-on-ebooks/
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/penguin-sees-ebook-growth-increase-by-106-in-2011/
