Nielsen Media Research

At Thursday's "Trends in the Christian Children's Market" panel at BookExpo America, publishers agreed that the historic obstacles to getting their books into ABA stores matter less these days. Consumers "are buying them everywhere-mass market stores, chains," said Laura Minchew, publisher of Tommy Nelson, now a part of HarperCollins Christian Publishing. The panel, moderated by Mary Manz-Simon, a children's book author and a specialist in the market, also included Annette Bourland, group publisher of Zonderkidz (and part of HCCP); Dan Lynch, publisher of B&H Kids;

According to a quick Google search, the typical U.S. household now pays between $80 and $90 per month for the TV component of their cable bill (excluding broadband and phone service). Now compare that to the price of an all-you-can-read digital content subscription service like Next Issue for magazines or Oyster for books. The former is $10-$15/month and the latter is $10/month.

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.

The publishing industry is not one of the overachievers in terms of its use of big data. And since my book on big data-Big Data @ Work-is out, I thought it might be fun to speculate on what big data will do to the business of publishing books. The goal of any publisher is to get its content bought and read. In the past, publishers could know only if their books and magazines were bought, and knowing even that was problematic.

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.

Swing a cat on the App Store - boots optional - and you'll hit hundreds of rubbish fairytale apps for kids. More grim than Grimm.

One of the publishers to have bucked that trend is Nosy Crow, the British children's publisher that has built its business on a blend of traditional (print) book publishing and a series of critically-acclaimed book-apps.

Its Three Little Pigs, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood show it is perfectly possible to make a fairytale app with craft and care, while ensuring that interactivity

On the surface, it looked like business as usual at this year's Digital Book World conference in New York City earlier this week, with no groundbreaking announcements, no radical plans hatched to transform the book business as we know it. But as always, when publishers convene to discuss the state of the industry, a few ideas emerge.

Teens Not Reading for Fun

Of the news repeated over-and-over again in private conversation, it was that a recent Nielsen Books survey revealed 41% of teenagers aged 13-17 said that they do not read books for fun.

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. 

At roughtype.com, Nicholas Carr continued his examination of the decline in ebook sales growth, a trend that started in 2012 and seems to be continuing this year. According to an Association of American Publishers report, e-book sales in the U.S. trade market for the first quarter of 2013 grew by just 5% over the same period in 2012. Meaning, according to Carr, "the explosive growth of the last few years has basically petered out, according to the APP numbers."

From e-books to streaming music, people are moving to digital formats for their entertainment. But not all are moving at the same pace. The way we buy may be as much a factor of gender and ethnic group as spending power, according to this recent Nielsen U.S. Consumer Entertainment Report. Digital music buyers, for example, are 5 percent more likely than the average U.S. adult to be Hispanic. E-book buyers are 21 percent more likely to be female. And buyers of streaming services are 73 percent more likely to be Asian.