From an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses an AAUP survey on digital publishing strategies:
The Amazon Kindle format led the list of platforms, vendors, and aggregators that presses said they use to deliver digital access to what they publish. Eighty-one percent of presses said they’ve gone the Kindle route. That’s not a surprise. Amazon has become “the No. 1 sales revenue channel for almost everyone,” said John P. Hussey, director of sales and marketing at the University Press of Kentucky and a member of the AAUP committee that organized the survey. In his experience, university presses get 60 to 70 percent of their retail revenues from Amazon sales now.
The survey showed that the Kindle has some sturdy competition, though. Other popular e-book delivery options included ebrary (also used by 81 percent of respondents), Google’s eBookstore (74 percent), and Barnes and Noble’s Nook (68 percent). One university-press e-book consortium, Project MUSE’s UPCC, is used by 59 percent of those surveyed.
It doesn’t come as a shock to learn that almost all of the respondents—93 percent—said they are “pursuing” individual e-book sales. The survey didn’t ask for specifics on what “pursuing” means, exactly, but the figure confirms that e-books have become well established in the university-press community, at least in planning discussions. The individual e-book sales figure was 66 percent in a similar 2009-10 survey.
E-books don’t loom large yet as a source of revenue for many presses, though, according to the new survey. Only two presses reported that e-books made up 10 to 15 percent of their earnings in the 2011 fiscal year. Twenty presses said that figure was in the 1 to 3 percent range.
Thanks, to Michael von Glahn for the link.
