Online Sales

A new bookstore is going to have to bring its offerings to where people are rather than the other way around; a new bookstore has to be ubiquitous. A recent example of this comes from HarperCollins,which has created an arrangement with Twitter to sell copies of the bestselling Divergent series of young adult novels from within individual tweets. If the implications of this aren't clear, look closely. Hundreds of millions of people swap information via social media every day. Now these online conversations can have bookstores

The contract between "Big Five" book publisher HarperCollins and Amazon is about to expire, and HarperCollins is refusing to sign an agreement with the new terms that Amazon is asking, a source with knowledge of the situation tells Business Insider. 

The contract presented to HarperCollins was the same contract recently signed by Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan, Amazon confirmed.

If HarperCollins and Amazon don't come to an agreement, no print or digital HarperCollins books will be available on Amazon once its existing contract runs out "very soon," our source says. 

Today's ebook subscription providers offer a nice value proposition for avid readers. It's great that the all-you-can-read models from Oyster, Scribd, and Kindle Unlimited provide consumers with something other than the print model where you buy one book at a time. Now the industry needs to think about how the subscription option can evolve further and enable even more interesting business models.

Print book sales showed "continuing resilience" in 2014, with overall spending on print and digital titles increasing across the year. Meanwhile, online book buying overtook in-store book buying for the first time last year.

In 2014, sales of print and e-books stood at £2.2bn, up 4% from the previous year. The data was revealed today (25th March) at Nielsen Book's annual conference, BookInsights.

Overall, e-books accounted for 30% of book units purchased in 2014, with the fastest growth coming in non-fiction and children's categories. However, digital migration in those categories still remains limited

Oyster, a Netflix-style service for e-books, has brought on its first chief financial officer, Jeannie Mun.

Before joining Oyster, Mun spent a lot of time in the ad world, having recently served as CFO at ad company MediaMath, and before that working as vice president of finance and strategy at ad software company Operative.

So why join an e-book startup? Mun said she was starting to think about "the next stage of my career," and after meeting with Oyster CEO Eric Stromberg, she became "more and more excited" about finding a role that combined her experience

The Barnes & Noble shopping bag spent years promoting a product-the Nook e-reader, an also-ran rival to the Amazon Kindle-that was intended virtually to eliminate the need for bookstore shopping bags. It didn't work. Now B&N has decided to use its shopping bags to emphasize something Amazon.com doesn't offer: bookstores that offer handsome plastic bags.  

"You don't get a shopping bag when you shop online-you get a box," says Glenn Kaplan, Barnes & Noble's creative director. The company distributes more than 90 million bags a year, making the totes one of its most effective advertising campaigns.

It's always been easy to post a review on Amazon; simply jot down a few sentences, select a star rating, and you're done. It's so easy to post a review, in fact, that it's also easy to miss important details. That doesn't help readers, and it doesn't help Amazon, which is why Amazon has added more options. In addition to the star rating, Amazon has added extra dropdown menus which invite reviewers to describe the quality of the writing, the amount of sex and violence in the book, and other details.

Social selling may be the new frontier for trade publishers. Today HarperCollins announced a partnership with Twitter to promote the film tie-in edition of Insurgent in conjunction with the movie's release. Twitter Commerce allows Insurgent fans to purchase the book with one click, direct from HarperCollins, without leaving the social media site. HarperCollins and Twitter will promote the campaign and send targeted offers to users who are tweeting about the new film.

The wall between publishers and their sales data is slowly but surely tumbling down. The latest retailer breaching the divide is Rakuten, the Japanese-based ecommerce company which recently announced the launch of its Books Dashboard in Japan. The dashboard allows publishers to track the sales of both print and ebooks sold through the Rakuten online bookstore.

Although just about every publisher has headaches dealing with Amazon, very few could deny that Amazon is their most profitable account, if they take sales volume, returns, and the cost of servicing into consideration. This fact is almost never acknowledged and therefore qualifies as one of the industry's dirty little secrets. Because they've consolidated the book-buying audience online and deliver to it with extraordinary efficiency, Amazon must feel totally justified in clawing back margin; it wasn't their idea to be every publisher's most profitable account!