The Book Industry Study Group

In a long-expected move, Amazon on July 18 announced the launch of Kindle Unlimited, a new subscription service that will give users unlimited access to a selection of 600,000 ebooks and more than 2,000 audiobooks on Amazon Kindle devices and any device with a Kindle app for $9.99 per month. Amazon is not first to market with an "all you can read" commercial ebook subscription platform-it follows last year's launch of Scribd and Oyster. But the online retailer's financial resources, marketing clout, and massive base of Kindle users will doubtless raise consumer awareness

The overall US book and journal publishing industry generated $27.01 billion in net revenue for 2013, representing 2.59 billion in units (volume), according to BookStats Volume 4, the annual statistical survey of publishing's size and scope being released today. As reported in BookStats, the Trade sector - covering general consumer fiction and non-fiction - generated $14.63 billion in net revenue and 2.32 billion in volume.

For 2013, Adult Non-Fiction was the fastest-growing Trade category, surpassing Juvenile (Children's/Young Adult) which had been the growth leader for the past two years.

With Amazon.com (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos battling major publishers to divvy up the economic spoils of the book market, both sides could point to seemingly good news in the latest industry statistics.

U.S. publishers collected about $3 billion in trade ebook sales last year, virtually unchanged from 2012, according to the new report from the Bookstats Project, jointly produced by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. Total revenue from print and digital books in the trade category, which excludes textbooks and journals, declined 2% to $14.6 billion.

New York, NY: April 8, 2014) BISG and eBook Architects, a service of Firebrand Technologies, are pleased to announce a major new training and certification program in ebook development. It is intended to provide a high level of professional development for ebook developers, managers, publishing executives, print book designers, and production professionals involved in ebook creation, and anyone else who is interested in the creation of ebooks.

Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) have announced early details of the conference program for the upcoming IDPF Digital Book 2014.

Thema is a new global subject code scheme meant to standardize how publishers, booksellers, and others describe book content. It’s something the U.S. publishing ecosystem should be paying close attention to.

It seems the love affair between hard-copy books and the reading public wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Hence, the tendency to curl up next to the fireplace with a good e-reader is becoming more and more commonplace. Digital books have certainly made their mark on the trade publishing side. According to BookStats 2013, which is co-produced by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, e-books-driven by adult fiction and children's/young adult-have grown 45 percent since 2011 and now constitute 20 percent of the trade market.

You won't see Adolf Hitler peering back at you from the featured display tables at Barnes & Noble any time soon. But browse the most popular e-book stores these days and Der Führer's mug is seemingly unavoidable. For a year now, his magnum manifesto has loomed large over current best-sellers on iTunes, where at the time of this writing two different digital versions of Mein Kampf rank 12th and 15th on the Politics & Current Events chart alongside books by modern conservative powerhouses like Sarah Palin, Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck.

Assuming your tablet is the property of the entire family, sharing eBooks and digital newspapers and magazines is easy - just pass the iPad. But many tablets and eReaders are the exclusive property of their owners, so content sharing is rare. This is a problem when consumers compare the value of digital to that of print. eBook The Book Industry Study Group, working with Nielsen Book Research, released a study last week that shows the steady growth of eBooks. 

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) is pleased to announce the winners of its inaugural Industry Awards, presented at its Annual Meeting of Members on September 27, 2013.