Some short postings: ebook sales at Amazon, Overdrive costs, new iPhone
By Paul Biba
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette quotes an Amazon spokesperson as saying:
“For every 100 books we sell in physical, we sell 48 Kindle books,” said Cinthia Portugal, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com. “This is up from 35 books for every 100 in May. Our customers tell us they read more with Kindle because they never have to worry about running out of books.”
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How much does Overdrive cost? Well for one library it costs $21,000 a year, in addition to a $3,500 monthly fee. In addition the library spends $1,500 per month to buy additional titles, which are less expensive then the hard copy version.
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MacRumors is reporting that an iPhone developer has spotted usage records for an unreleased iPhone which was being tested in San Francisco. When is the next generation coming? I’m up to get a 3GS in December and am thinking of waiting a few months to see if anything is going to happen.
November 29th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Ms Portugal contradicts herself or has been misquoted.
In the reference above, she says that…
“For every 100 books we sell in physical, we sell 48 Kindle books,”…“This is up from 35 books for every 100 in May.”
And yet her reported words in May were…
“Kindle titles already account for more than 35 percent of unit sales for books that are available in both print and on Kindle.”
http://tinyurl.com/q7rntx
48 books out of 148 books is approximately 32%. Is she saying that sales are down? Unlikely. Perhaps they are up because this time she is referring to all books sold by amazon.com and not just those that were available also in Kindle format. Probably not.
It’s hard to compare without clarification.
November 30th, 2009 at 4:35 am
$1500 a month for 30 new titles??
That’s $50 a book – twice the price of a new hardback.
November 30th, 2009 at 5:36 am
The article about Overdrive is talking about audiobooks. Audiobooks are extremely expensive.
Does anybody know how this kind of system works? If the library uses the Overdrive service and patrons download audio books how many copies of a given book can be “lent out” at a time?
In theory it could be infinite but my guess is that there is a limit.
November 30th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
on the Kindle book sales, I assume they count free books as sales. I just looked at the Kindle best sellers and found the top 9, 9 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 25 bestsellers are free.