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Find out the latest news from the bookselling industry. You will learn all about the business of audiobooks, ebooks, manga, newspapers, and digital magazines.
eBook usage in Germany increases by 50%
24.4 million eBooks were sold in the first nine months of 2018, this is massive 19% increase from the same period last year. One of the driving trends of the year is that the average price of ebooks fell from €6.29 to €6.07 per eBook. Tolino released a few new e-readers this year and more competitors are entering the market. Amazon continues to be the dominant force and recently introduced the latest generation Paperwhite 4.
Is Bookeen in trouble?
Bookeen has been making e-readers since 2003 and has a long and storied history of developing unique products. In the past few months the company seems to be in trouble. Audrey Keszek has been responsible for Bookeens social media accounts since 2010 and recently left the company in August. A successor was hired, but so far he does not done any work. All of the products on the Bookeen online store are unavailable and the company has stated that they were victims of their own success and everything is out of stock. They recommend everyone buy things from other online companies such as Le Clerc.
Litnet: Read books before they get published
How to read best sellers before they’re complete and published? Just imagine, let’s say George Martin, the author of “Game of Thrones,” releases his new novel not in full, but publishes it chapter by chapter. Readers engage in discussions of plot twists and character developments expressing their ideas on how the story should proceed. Martin takes some of those suggestions on board and surprises his readers with the very plot twist they’ve been longing for. “Impossible!”, you’re thinking. And you’re wrong. This has become possible with the launch of the English version of Litnet an innovative literary platform that has been successfully operating on the global market since 2015.
Major Publications are doubling down on book coverage
Since the beginning of 2017, The New York Times has continued to expand its already robust book coverage. More recently, New York announced that it would triple its book coverage. In October, The Atlantic launched a Books section and a newsletter, “The Books Briefing,” with plans for “additional products.” Even BuzzFeed is getting in on the action: in November, they launched an online book club, complete with an attendant Facebook group and newsletter. Amazon Charts launched last year in the United States and it is a new bestseller list that gives users a top 20 list of of the most read and most sold books on Amazon. You can get a sense on what is a true bestseller for not only books, but audiobooks and ebooks too. Basically it accurately reflects how readers are really reading and buying books and even pulls data from popular books on Kindle Unlimited.
The New York Media organization has also expanded on their books coverage. It’s named Boris Kachka as its books editor, and he’ll be in charge of tripling book coverage across New York Media properties — the print magazine, Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, The Strategist, and Grub Street. Vulture will also have more coverage of audiobooks, genre (like YA and horror), and new releases; it already runs a real-life monthly book club at The Strand. The Cut will run more book excerpts and author profiles, as well as a series called “Yesterday’s Women,” in which essayists will write about overlooked women writers. Daily Intelligencer runs weekly Q&As with authors of important nonfiction books. The Strategist has developed best-of lists and also links to existing ones, and Grub Street will publish new cookbook roundups and excerpts from chef and restaurant memoirs.
Over a third Black Friday purchases were made on the phone
Black Friday was all over various news channels the past couple of days and Adobe has reported that 33.5% of online Black Friday sales were completed on smartphones , last year only 29.1% of purchases were made on one. Black Friday pulled in $6.22 billion in online sales, up 23.6% from a year ago and setting a new high. Adobe tracks transactions for 80 of the top 100 internet retailers in the U.S. like Walmart and Amazon. So these figures are the best we are going to get.
While it’s not clear exactly what prompted the uptick in phone-based shopping sprees, Adobe’s Taylor Schreiner credited it in part to stores crafting “better mobile experiences.” We’d add that the phones themselves might provide more enjoyable shopping through larger screens — it doesn’t feel quite so much like you’re shopping through a porthole. Whether you thrive on Black Friday or just see it as consumerism run amok, the data suggests that a growing number of people are comfortable leaving their PCs behind when they make big-ticket purchases.
