2011: The Year In Book Publishing, By The Numbers

paidcontent reporting:
From Borders’ bankruptcy to Amazon’s ambitions, it was a busy year in book publishing. Here are five numbers to put 2011 in focus.
20: The percentage of book sales that are digital at big-six publishers Random House and Hachette, with other publishers well on their way to reaching that point. It’s estimated that e-books made up 6.4 percent of the trade book market in 2010, and though we don’t yet have an overall figure for 2011, we know many publishers saw triple-digit e-book growth this year thanks to the increased availability of books in digital formats and affordability of e-readers. In addition, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) reported this year that it now sells more e-books than print books. Companies without a plan for the digital shift (some argue that includes big-six publishers) are in danger of obscurity; this year, bankrupt bookstore chain Borders shuttered its remaining stores.
$79: The price of Amazon’s cheapest Kindle, the ad-supported Kindle 4 with Special Offers. In the last quarter of this year, we saw e-ink e-readers drop below $100 for the first time—and not just older models but the newest-generation devices. The Kindle Touch with Special Offers is $99, the ad-supported Kobo Touch with Offers is $99.99 and Barnes & Noble’s ad-free Nook Simple Touch is now $99. The e-readers’ sub-$100 prices move them into impulse-purchase territory, while Amazon’s $199 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet has emerged as the first credible iPad competitor.
100,000+: The number of original e-singles that longform journalism site Byliner has sold since April. Many newspaper, magazine, book and website publishers, from the LA Times to kids’ book publisher Scholastic, started publishing e-singles this year—standalone works of fiction and nonfiction that are longer than typical articles but shorter than full-length books. E-singles are a logical (and inexpensive) way to monetize previously published content or introduce new ideas “at their natural length,” as Amazon’s Kindle Singles puts it. It remains to be seen whether e-singles priced at $1.99 or $2.99 can bring publishers a significant source of revenue, but 2011 provided us with many testing grounds.
$9.99: The price around which class-action lawsuits against Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and publishers are centered, and the price that Amazon charged for a New York Times (NYSE: NYT) bestseller before big-six publishers adopted agency pricing, which allows them to set the prices of their own e-books.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-highlights-of-2011-the-year-in-publishing-by-the-numbers/