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400 percent growth in e-book sales at Random House in ’08
December 19, 2008 | 2:09 am
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By David Rothman
No wonder Random House plans to double the number of e-titles to 15,000 in just months.
Random enjoyed 400 percent growth in e-book sales in ’08.
In an end-of-the year letter picked up by the New York Observer, CEO Markus Dohle writes:
More consumers every week are choosing to read books on a screen rather than on paper, making our considerable investments in digital-publishing development and resources vital and necessary. Our e-book publishing programs in the U.K., Germany, and Canada increased significantly in 2008, and we are budgeting for more such growth in ’09. In the U.S., the biggest electronic-publishing market, our e-book sales for 2008 have grown by 400% over last year. Our e-catalog will consist of more than 15,000 Random House, Inc. titles by mid-2009, some of which are now newly available on the iPhone.
(Via Galley Cat and a friend of mine.)
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Comments:
Some more news:
1. Rumor has it that HarperCollins and Borders Bookstores have agreed (or are in the processing of agreeing) that HC will give Borders a larger discount in exchange for no returns. Perhaps one of the fundamental flaws of the book industry — returns — is losing some life.
2. According to Publisher’s Weekly the AAP October sales report shows a 73% increase in ebook sales over October 2007 and a 57.7% year-to-date increase.
Did they actually release any numbers quantifying the number of copies they sold?
I mean if they only sold 1 copy last year and then 4 this year that is not too impressive
if this means that they now sell 400 titles instead of 40 this means nothing at all, or in other words using raw statistics on small numbers dont give you a meaning full result.
This is how bubbles are made, someone seas those numbers not realising that the total revenue is’t really that big ie a 2% increase on one title in retail sale might acount for the total anual ebook market.
Whats the estimate for how long it will take the ebook industry to reach the same revenue as the retail sale of p-books at those rates 5-10 years or as most probably think 50-100 years
Aside from the growth rate inflation based on increase from zero there is another factor. We also need to know if e-book increase is also promoting p-book sales. There is also a less apparent type of p-book growth as genres are shed to screen reading that were never suited to print. Airline schedules were once printed, but more significantly popular si-fi, mystery and romance genres appear to dominate e-book distribution. In this sector print functionality and marketability can increase as numbers diminish.
HG and others: Good point: This is a bit comparable to Amazon not giving all the info. That said, the actual numbers probably aren’t too bad if Random is planning to double the number of titles in E.
Thanks,
David
The thing about bubbles is that they tend to take whats a moderately profitable niche market for the cost aware business. into a money wasting contenst with high flying failures.
Remember web sales of books where only amazon still exists, and It’s only because they got into mainframe operations as a side business it did not wound up hugely in the red. There were others Books on line and dusins of heavyly funded competitors who never made it out of the bubble. It’s a viable business but not at the scale that makes the bubble scale investment worth it.
The same can easily happen to ebooks, and to an extend i think it does with the iphone/gizmomania, the market for digital texts is there but the return on investment on hugle monolith systems tied to hw might not be great.
As for e-book sales figures, we can do some guesstimation.
In my opinion, in 2008, at least 8 million e-books were sold. How did I come to this conclusion?
Simple.
Publishers get about 5.86 dollars on each e-book they sell digitally. In October 2008, US e-book publishers (I mean about 12-15 of them) saw § 5.2 million in revenue (IDPF figure). So these publishers sold about 900,000 e-books in October 2008.
So e-books are starting to sell extremely well in America.
Lucasso