07:07 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

AUTHOR EARNING'S Data Guy just gave a presentation at the Romance Writers of America, detailing the state of the Romance book market in 2016:

http://authorearnings.com/2016-rwa-pan-presentation/

The charts are downloadable and mostly self explanatory.
He thoroughly dissects the results of different strategies for title length, pricing, release rates, whether to participate in Kindle Unlimited, whether to set the first volume in a series free...

Interesting reading for anybody curious about how the romance cake is baked.

For everybody else, the juicy stuff lies in the general ebook market overview in the first few slides:

http://authorearnings.com/wp-content...07/Slide08.png

http://authorearnings.com/wp-content...07/Slide10.png

http://authorearnings.com/wp-content...07/Slide12.png

http://authorearnings.com/wp-content...07/Slide14.png

Points that stand out:

- Romance makes up 4.4% of the print book sales captured by Nielsen Bookscan and 45% of paid ebook sales at Amazon. Romance accounts for 235M paid ebook sales a year across Amazon, Apple, Nook, etc. Essentially, two thirds of the romance book market is invisibile to the publishing establishment because 89% of all romance books sold are in digital form.

- More generally: Kindle ebook market share is up to 74%, Apple is running at 11%, Nook 5%, Kobo 3%, Google 2%, and Other 2%. (Back in 2010, when Agency first kicked in, Amazon stood at 54% and Nook at 26%, with Sony around 10%).

Much more at the source, including the usual pretty pictures.

One point to remember: Harlequin policy through the decades was to let most of the titles they published go out of print after a couple of years and, since they considered them "played out", would routinely revert rights upon request. That practice has, of course, ended. But in the years between 2007 and 2012 a whole lot of romance writers rescued a whole lot of titles from out-of-print, typically adding new covers and re-releasing them on KDP. That means they not only brought along the titles but also their "brands" and their readers.

In short: to a very large extent, Indie ebooks becoming a mainstream business is due to romance readers. (With SF&F right behind.)

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Have something interesting to say about e-books or mobile computing? Join our forums and share your view on topics like the ones discussed at MobileRead this past week...

E-Book General - News

• USA & Canada: Free ebook each month from Tor.com

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Network Maintenance July 20th, 4am ET

03:32 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Hi,

Our datacenter will perform some maintenance on its optical network on July 20. The window is from 4am to 6am ET. During that time traffic will be temporarily re-routed which means you may experience brief periods of downtime or latency. Sorry about that!

Alex

03:33 PM by pdurrant in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

If you live in USA or Canada, Tor.com have a great offer starting up - a free ebook every month if you sign up to their mailing list.

See http://ebookclub.tor.com/ for full details.

The first book on offer is The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

[Update: The first month's offer is now over. But you can still sign up to their mailing list to get next month's free ebook, although we won't know what that is until next month]

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

If you've been a bit too busy to keep up, here are a few of our favorite stories from the past week.

E-Book Software - Calibre Companion

• Calibre Companion for iPhone has been started!

09:31 PM by Steve_Haley in E-Book Software | Calibre Companion

Hello everyone,

I'd like to announce that Calibre Companion for iPhone has been started. It's been a long time coming! To reintroduce myself, I worked with Chaley on the original Android version a few years ago.

We're still a way off from making a public iPhone version, but the community here has been so fantastic in helping us test that we'd like to ask again. Who would like to be an alpha tester? Obviously you'll need an iPhone or iPad. Update: we now have enough people for the initial test, thanks to everyone who volunteered.

The plan would be to send a version out in about two weeks. It will contain the basic functions for CC: connecting 'as a wireless device', syncing books, sorting and the grouping drawer, and handing books over to a reader app. Testing the connecting is the main thing we'd like help with, as that took us quite a while to get right last time round.

After that initial version, the timeline is a bit more vague. It took chaley and me a few months to get the original CC Android version ready. This time round will be a bit quicker, but it will still take at least a month. So please don't get too excited, even though we do realise you've waited a long time for this. (This time, it will be nice to skip some of the errors we made with the first version. For example, we originally thought people would only want to have 10 to 50 books on their devices at one time. That clearly turned out to be wrong as people now routinely have thousands of books!)

Thanks,
Steve

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

If you've been too busy to check out MobileRead this week, check out our usual roundup:

E-Book General - News

• eBook settlement credit is on the way
• New Basic Kindle from Amazon

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• July 2016 Book Club Nominations

E-Book Software - Marvin

• Marvin 3.0 is out

06:48 AM by kguil in E-Book Software | Marvin

Hello Everyone. Marvin 3 is out and available now. You can get it for free + 20% off premium upgrade for a limited time. Marvin Side-by-Side (SxS) is also available now at 20% off for a limited time as well.

You can download Marvin 3 for free from here.

App Store propagation may be a bit slow, so M3 might not show up right away in searches. Your best bet it to get it from Marvin's website.

I hope you enjoy it!

Have a lovely week.