The romance with the printed word shows no signs of abating. Despite the rapid growth in ebook sales in recent years, print book output in 2011 grew by 6%, to 347,178 titles, compared to the prior year. The preliminary numbers released Tuesday by bibliographic database Bowker are "the most significant expansion in more than four years" in the traditional publishing sector, the company said in its annual report on U.S. print book publishing. The uptick was driven entirely by self-published titles. Without them, the number of print titles would have been flat. "Much as ebooks have been the sexier topic over the past few years, most people still read print books," noted Michael Norris, a senior analyst with publishing research firm Simba Information. He added that the allure of print clearly extends to self-published titles. "If you talk to the given self-published author, some will admit they get a certain amount of pleasure from holding a physical book, signing it, and giving it as a gift—something that you just can't do with ebooks," he said. The universe of printed books is larger than those tracked by Bowker, which only counts books assigned an ISBN number, which identifies them for commercial purposes. Bowker also has a separate count for titles it classifies as reprint/print on demand. Those titles are sold almost exclusively on the Web, and are put out mainly by publishing houses specializing in works that are in the public domain. There were 1.1 million titles in... Continue reading at 'Crains New York'
[ Crains New York | 2012-06-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
By Tim Conneally, Betanews Wednesday, Web retailer Amazon launched its Kindle Singles line of literature designed specifically for consumption on e-readers. The works, priced between $1.00 and $3.00, include original works of prose, essays and theses, and the the first TEDBooks.Last October,... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2011-01-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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