Traditional Sales
December 8, 2015 at 2:50 pm
On a recent Sunday afternoon, the journalist and editor Aaron Hicklin was standing among some still-empty shelves in his newly completed bookstore, One Grand, in a former mercantile building in the town of Narrowsburg, New York. In less than one week, he would open the doors to the shop, but at the moment he was…
December 7, 2015 at 11:47 am
The American city that spends the most money on books, magazines, and newspapers—Washington, D.C.—will soon be left without any chain bookstores. Despite the recent revival of the brick-and-mortar bookshop (in London, and Seattle, and even The People’s Republic of China, not to mention Washington itself), The Washington Post reports that Barnes & Noble is slated…
December 1, 2015 at 2:48 pm
Your average trade publisher is a laundry list of bad business characteristics: Consumer customers (the worst/least predictable kind of customer). Entertainment good (the worst/least predictable kind of product). A market that’s shifting increasingly to the blockbuster model (the worst/least predictable kind of market). Dominated by vendor duopolies (Amazon and B&N in the states, Amazon and…
November 10, 2015 at 2:44 pm
According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), July was a strong month for trade publishers. In its Monthly StatShot report, the AAP reported that sales grew .3% in the trade market from January to July 2015 -- the first increase in trade sales this year. Driving that growth were double-digit increases in adult, children/YA,…
November 6, 2015
Softening sales for digital books have impacted the bottom lines at HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, according to both companies' recent earnings reports.
November 3, 2015 at 1:13 pm
The opening of Amazon.com's first brick-and-mortar store on Tuesday proves that software is not really "eating the world," as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it in 2011. In his widely noted Wall Street Journal column about predatory software, Andreessen wrote: Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company -- its core capability is its amazing software…
October 30, 2015 at 1:00 am
Apple files to overturn e-book ruling.
October 21, 2015 at 2:16 pm
The India Book Market Report released by Nielsen at Frankfurt Book Fair last week values the print book market in India, including book imports, at $3.9 billion. This positions India among the largest English-language book markets in the world. The compound annual growth rate of the market is 20.4% between 2011-12 and 2014-15, according to…
October 13, 2015 at 2:22 pm
The hidden cost of college textbooks can be a surprise for many students in higher education. The cost may soon be a worry of the past if the Affordable College Textbook Act passes. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and Minnesota Senator Al Franken have worked together to create the Affordable College Textbook Act, hoping to provide…
October 5, 2015 at 12:15 pm
In the wake of the positive response to its direct purchase of Haruki Murakami’s latest book, asiaone.com reports that the Japanese bookstore chain Kinokuniya “plans to increase direct purchases of books from publishers – as opposed to the conventional practice of buying them through wholesale booksellers.” As we reported last month, Kinokuniya purchased 90,000 copies…
