With all the gold medals being handed out at the Olympics, let’s reserve one for the e-book business. The International Digital Publishing Forum and Association of American Publishers have released stats for December 2009, and sales set the bar for E-Books’ greatest month ever, $19,100,000. That figure more than doubles the previous December’s mark and tops the best month to date, October ’09 at $18,500,000.

How high on the podium are e-books standing? The industry reported more sales in the fourth quarter of ’09 ($55,900,000) alone than the total sales for all of ’08 ($53,500,000).

And let’s not forget that these are stats just for the downloads. Add sales of Kindle and other e-reading hardware in the holiday season and you have a performance nothing short of dazzling, in this or any other economy.

The true sales numbers may be even higher than the above chart indicates. Michael Smith, Executive Director of IDPF reminds us that:

* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices”

RC