The numbers of e-books sold every year continues to rise, and publishers are making more money from them, too. Data from the annual BookStats study released by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group on Wednesday May 15 showed 457 million e-books were sold last year, accounting for 20 percent of all book sales reported by publishers. That’s up from 15 percent last year. Sales of fiction e-books rose by 42 percent in 2012, while the growth in sales of nonfiction e-books was just 22 percent. Perhaps most telling, however, was the fact the "e-book sales in the children’s...

Last year was a positive one for U.S. trade publishers, according to the Association of American Publishers' newest “StatShot” monthly report for December 2012. Digital Book World has an extensive breakdown of the statistics from the report. Most notably, e-books accounted for 23 percent of net revenues for 2012, which is up from 17 percent in 2011 and just one percent in 2010. U.S. publishers saw a net revenue gain of 6.2 percent ($7.1 billion) compared to 2011. The top categories were Adult Fiction/Non-Fiction and Children’s/Young Adults. Between those two categories and religious e-books, publishers gained a 41 percent increase in net revenue,...

The Daily Telegraph ran an interesting story yesterday about an e-book related scientific study undertaken in 2011 by the Media Convergence Research Unit at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The study received a fair amount of media attention when it was first reported, and if you've been following the digital publishing industry for awhile, it might sound familiar. The study's purpose was to provide "a scientific basis for dispelling the widespread misconception that reading from a screen has negative effects," as Dr. Stephan Füssel, chair of the Gutenberg-Institute of Book Studies, explained it at the time. (TeleRead covered the study in October 2011.) So, why is the study back in the...

Digital Book World's Jeremy Greenfield reported yesterday about a new digital reading survey from The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which looks at how parents and kids read together on digital devices. The survey of almost 500 iPad owners found that 27 percent of them did not read on their iPads at all with their children, and of those who did, most placed limitations on how and when they did so. From a recap of a Digital Reader post: "The single most common reason for not co-reading with the iPad was the obvious one; 60% of these 127 parents have a preference for...

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) released the results of a smartphone survey recently (title: A Portrait of Today's Smartphone User [click link for PDF download]), and assuming you have the patience to read between the lines, you'll find some fairly interesting trend predictors. For instance, the following comes directly from an OPA press release announcing the study: Smartphone users are cross-platform consumers: Smartphone users have strong cross-platform tendencies, with 84% identifying themselves as two-screen multitaskers (TV + mobile phone/tablet) and 64% identifying themselves as three-screen multitaskers (TV + PC + mobile phone/tablet). Smartphone is the preferred media device for many: 54% of multiple mobile device...

I began working for a number of different trade publications in the consumer electronics space recently, and since then, I've found myself becoming something of a sucker for statistical consumer-based surveys. This recent Computerworld story, for instance, mentions the results of a comScore survey in which 6,000 U.S. tablet owners were questioned. The market researchers divided the tablet owners into three separate categories: Owners of iPads, owners of Android tablets and owners of Kindle Fires. (According to the article, comScore made the decicion to separate owners of the Kindle Fire from owners of Android tablets; that decision was based on Google's...

GalleyCat and AppNewser have a pair of articles discussing some sales figures from a recent BookStats report. GalleyCat notes that adult fiction e-book sales accounted for 30% of net publisher sales in 2011—up from 13% in 2010. Net sales revenue from e-books more than doubled, from $869 million in 2010 to $2.074 billion in 2011, and now accounts for 15% of all surveyed publishers’ net revenues. AppNewser reports from the same survey that the monetary size of the publishing market as a whole declined by 2.5% from $27.9 billion in 2010 to $27.2 billion in 2011—but overall units went...

Many e-reader users are undoubtedly aware that the Internet-enabled devices they’re using to read e-books are also tracking their reading habits and reporting them back to their manufacturer. But have we ever really stopped to think about what this means? The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the phenomenon looking at the uses to which Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo are putting some of that data. While Amazon didn’t say what it does with the data it gathers, beyond sharing “most highlighted passages” and so forth, Barnes & Noble is attempting to use it to help...

On MediaBistro’s GalleyCat, Jason Boog reports that data from the March Association of American Publishers net sales revenue report shows that e-book sales revenue has for the first time ever exceeded that of hardcover books in the first quarter of 2012. Adult e-book sales for that period were $282.3 million, while adult hardcovers were $229.6 million. For comparison, the sales numbers were $220.4 million and $223.5 million respectively, during the first quarter of last year. It’s also worth noting that the sales figures for adult paperback fell from $335 to $299.8 million from 1Q11 to 1Q12; e-books are narrowing...

Digital Book World reports on an interesting study of interactions between 32 parent-child pairs when reading print books with either e-books or “enhanced” books. The preliminary results (PDF) have just been released, and suggest that children are less engaged and retain fewer details about what they read when they read an enhanced book than when they read a regular e-book or print book. Among both parents and children, the level of content-related actions—discussing or pointing to something in the story—remained about the same from print to regular e-books, but dramatically dropped off from print to “enhanced” e-books. The level...

The UK’s Daily Mail surveyed 1,863 UK readers on their e-book reading habits and determined that 34% of the readers surveyed admitted to using e-readers to conceal that they were reading erotic literature, 57% to hide reading children’s books such as Harry Potter, and 26% to hide their science fiction habit. (Science fiction is the Rodney Dangerfield of literary genres—it gets no respect, sometimes even from its own fans.) All in all, counting overlap in categories, 58% of the readers admitted using the device to “hide” reading something they wouldn’t want others to see them with. So much...

On FutureBook, blogger “Agent Orange” discusses the way manuscript consideration times have ballooned in recent years. Where it used to be a known standard that editors should take only one month to decide whether to offer or reject, now manuscripts can be held for a year or more without the authors hearing anything about them. While this might have flown in days before the Internet, now authors have social media and can communicate their anger with their publishers to other authors who might then be inclined not to do business with that publisher. And that’s not the worst of...