the e-book Revolution 2

I keep seeing more and more and more people with e-book readers. Sunday night on the Acela back from DC, last night on the #5 train from Grand Central to Union Square, it's gone from being a special sighting to being a regular occurence.

Barnes & Noble spends so much time touting their wondrous results and the immense huge hitted-ness of their Nook on their earnings conference call this week that it wouldn't surprise me if the executives on the call shit in their pants from the excitement of what they were saying. As is the case when Amazon shits in its pants in excitement talking about the Kindle, there are all kinds of buzz words and not a lot of specifics. When they sales sales "exploded" beyond expectations does that mean they were expecting to sell 4 and actually sold 6, or they were shooting for 82,900 and sold 126,800? Their market share on e-books on some books is now above their 18% market share of physical bookstore sales. Which e-books? Bestsellers? Ones that sell 2 copies and B&N sold one? All of this stuff needs to be taken with a grain of salt, the Nook wasn't that well reviewed, and in the call they're very happy with the reviews, but there you have it.

We just got royalty statements for a book that came out around 14 months ago. Thru a November royalty report, it sold 475 non-Kindle e-books, with the biggest formats there accounting for 194 for the Sony Reader and 183 copies for another format which it's hard to tell exactly which it is. Then there's an e-book format that sold 2,271, which we guess to be the Kindle edition, for total e-book sales approx 2250 copies. The print version trade paperback sold 31,832, which number could go up or down based on other copies shipped and returned.

This doesn't really include any Nook sales, because that was just shipping about the time this royalty statement was closing.