Every month we eagerly await the e-book sales report issued by the Association of American Publishers and International Digital Publishing Forum. But we’ll be biting our fingernails until mid-February and mid-March when the respective stats for December and January are issued.  We’re dying to see whether predictions of the tidal wave of sales predicted for January come true.

For instance, USA Today trumpeted “Millions of gift-wrapped iPads, Kindles, Nooks and other digital reading devices resulted in an unprecedented surge in sales of e-books last week.”

How big a surge?  We can only speculate but the dimensions can be inferred from USA Today‘s bestseller list: a week after Christmas e-editions of the top six books outsold print editions.  Furthermore, say reporters Bob Minzesheimer and Carol Memmott, “Of the top 50, 19 had higher e-book than print sales. It’s the first time the top-50 list has had more than two titles in which the e-version outsold print.”

Not convinced?  That same week, 165,000 Stieg Larsson e-books were sold, exceeding by 10,000 the number of Larsson p-books.

Still not convinced?  Barnes & Noble says it sold 1 million e-books on Christmas Day.

Details in Week after holidays, e-book sales outdo print

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by USA Today.

Back in July 2009 USA Today began tracking Kindle bestsellers. Now the New York Times will provide an e-book bestseller list commencing early next year.  It will include not just Kindle sales but sales in all formats. We’re not sure how the listmakers will weight Kindle vs. iPad vs. Sony vs. Nook etc., and if the Times‘s secretive selection process for print book bestsellers is carried over, we’ll never know how it’s done for e-books, either. But you can try asking Janet Elder. She’s the editor at the newspaper tasked with surveys and analyses.

Julie Bosman, who covers the book biz eat for the Times, reports that the paper “will also redesign the section of its Sunday Book Review that features the best-seller lists.  She quotes Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review’s editor: “To give the fullest and most accurate possible snapshot of what books are being read at a given moment you have to include as many different formats as possible, and e-books have really grown, there’s no question about it.”

Details in Times Will Rank E-Book Best Sellers.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

While the digital revolution has redefined such terms as “book”, “author”, and “publisher”, the bestseller list has remained more or less immutable. It’s still pretty much the Sunday New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and a few other well respected gatekeepers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

There are countless imitators and emulators but until last year they were all based on the same fundamental principle, the velocity with which print books flow through checkout counters. They offer a snapshot of what the public is reading. But – given the growing popularity of e-books, are the old BS lists beginning to sound like…well, BS?

The e-book camel got its nose under the bestseller tent last July when USA Today announced it would include Kindle sales in its metrics. This week the newspaper added the Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony’s Reader™. According to the paper’s press release, USA Today‘s “list ranks titles regardless of genre or format, providing one of the best assessments of which books are most popular among readers and consumers each week.” USA Today boasts a daily print circulation of almost 2 million. It’s website, usatoday.com, claims to reach over 6 million daily.

How much will the addition of e-books impact on the bestseller lists of t0morrow? It will be interesting to find out. With Google, Amazon, Sony and B&N claiming e-warehouses of between 500,000 and 1 million books, the influx of titles into the list may skew the rankings like an elephant sitting on a see-saw.

Here’s the press release: USA TODAY’S Best-Selling Books List Continues to Add Digital Sales Information

Richard Curtis

USA Today announced today that its bestseller list will now include Kindle sales in its rankings. “Since October of 1993, USA Today‘s Best-Selling Books List has provided our readers with a complete picture of sales in the publishing industry,” said Susan Weiss, managing editor of the national newspaper’s Life section. “With the addition of sales figures from Kindle, we have created a more robust list which reflects the new platforms consumers and readers are using to purchase books.”

This list will run in Thursday’s edition of USA Today and online at booklist.usatoday.com.

“We are thrilled to be contributing Kindle book sales information to USA Today for their comprehensive bestseller list for books customers,” said Laura Porco, director of Kindle books. “Given the great overlap of taste between Kindle customers and physical book buyers, the USA Today Best-Selling Books List is truly reflective of what customers are buying regardless of format.”

You can read USA Today‘s release in its entirety here.

Kindle sales don’t seem to have been posted yet when we visited the list late Wednesday evening; only hardcover and paperback sales were noted. The top five were
#1 Common Sense by Glenn Beck, #2 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling, #3 New Moon by Stephenie Meyer, #4 Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer, and #5 My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.

USA Today‘s is by no means the first e-book bestseller list. Fictionwise, now wholly owned by Barnes & Noble, has kept one for years and it provides fascinating information on the performance of titles in e-books such as recent bestseller by title and by author, highest rated e-books (rated by fan vote) and all-time highest rated e-books.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (formally the Open eBook Forum), the trade and standards association for the eBook industry, has kept a tally of e-book bestsellers by member publishers. In October 2005 for instance the top five e-titles were:

#1 The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
#2 My Fair Temptress by Christina Dodd
#3 The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
#4 It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas
#5 MindWar by Darrell Bain

The IDPF’s list was culled from PDA’s, smartphones, eBook readers and PCs. In October 2005 Kindle was a still a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye.

Richard Curtis