Monday, February 14, 2011

The New York Times now lists e-book bestsellers

Sunday marked a literary milestone. For the first time, The New York Times published an e-book bestseller list.

Digital books -- purchased to be read on electronic readers, such as Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook or the iPad -- now account for 9 percent of books sales. And the numbers continue to climb.

"For top fiction titles, the typical e-book share was upward of 60 percent of total sales, with John Grisham’s latest, "The Confession," hitting 75 percent," The New York Times reports.

The world of e-book technology, vendors and publishers remains in flux, so these early efforts to track e-book sales leave out many categories.

The Times isn't counting perennial sellers, required classroom reading, textbooks, reference and test preparation guides, journals, workbooks, calorie counters, shopping guides, comics, crossword puzzles and self-published books.

It's also not tracking e-book sales for advice and how-to books, children’s books and graphic books, though it plans to add those "at a future date."

4 comments:

therestofthestory said...

I thought I had heard that ebook readers out sold hard bound books this last Christmas. I know Barnes and Noble had issues with their servers Christmas Day and day after.

Pam Kelley said...

I read the same thing. Apparently, there's a surge of ebook sales after Santa brings e-readers to everyone.

Sarah said...

I find it interesting that Teen and YA books jumped up to around 20% of all ebook sales after Christmas. Apparently a lot of kids got e-readers as holiday gifts!

Sarah
www.astorybeforebed.com

Mary Alice F. said...

Now, if they only had a flexible electronic reader, that would simulate the physical texture and "feel" characteristics of a paper book. then, i may be inclined to carry such a thing around. but until then, i dont think so. a paper book is so nice, physically there, and so much more real.