8/20/2012 @ Forbes Jeremy Greenfield - Contributor
Think consumers have a problem with higher priced e-books? Think again.
According to our new e-book best-seller list, most of the e-books that are bought each week are priced near or above $10 and the vast majority of them are published by “big six” publishers (the six largest in the U.S.: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House and Simon & Schuster), which set their own e-book prices (for now).
When we published this new best-seller list today, it caused some surprise in the publishing industry. It had been thought that inexpensive e-books, many self-published, were starting to control the best-seller lists. Our new list, which we believe is superior to e-book best-seller lists compiled by the New York Times and USA Today, showed that to be untrue.
The Digital Book World E-Book Best-Seller List is powered by Iobyte Solutions, a firm that deals with such data. The list is compiled using sales rankings from five of the largest book-sellers (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony and Google). You can read our complete methodology here and see the top 25 e-books here.
In addition to building a better overall best-seller list, we’ve divided the list by price categories, creating four separate lists that look at books priced $0.00 to $2.99, $3.00 to $7.99, $8.00 to $9.99, and $10 and above. In the e-book world, the competition between publishers really happens at various price points, which makes the lists much more useful for publishers. It also happened to reveal some interesting insights that I’ll share below.
Other insights:
– Large publishers control much of the lower end of the market, as opposed to self-published authors as had been thought
– Fifty Shades of Grey no longer controls the top three best-seller spots
– Novellas can be best-sellers at low price points
– Back-list book sales can be revived by a price change
More at Forbes
When we published this new best-seller list today, it caused some surprise in the publishing industry. It had been thought that inexpensive e-books, many self-published, were starting to control the best-seller lists. Our new list, which we believe is superior to e-book best-seller lists compiled by the New York Times and USA Today, showed that to be untrue.
The Digital Book World E-Book Best-Seller List is powered by Iobyte Solutions, a firm that deals with such data. The list is compiled using sales rankings from five of the largest book-sellers (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony and Google). You can read our complete methodology here and see the top 25 e-books here.
In addition to building a better overall best-seller list, we’ve divided the list by price categories, creating four separate lists that look at books priced $0.00 to $2.99, $3.00 to $7.99, $8.00 to $9.99, and $10 and above. In the e-book world, the competition between publishers really happens at various price points, which makes the lists much more useful for publishers. It also happened to reveal some interesting insights that I’ll share below.
Other insights:
– Large publishers control much of the lower end of the market, as opposed to self-published authors as had been thought
– Fifty Shades of Grey no longer controls the top three best-seller spots
– Novellas can be best-sellers at low price points
– Back-list book sales can be revived by a price change
More at Forbes
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