Without any formal advertising, Wilkinson’s first book, Locked In – first in a series of crime fiction novels – shot up the iTunes and Amazon book charts. “I got a Twitter message from someone I know, asking if I knew that my book was in the iTunes chart. I was somewhere around number 50. Then it just grew and grew.”

He sold his 100,000th copy on Christmas Eve, making it a “No 1 Amazon Kindle bestseller” in the UK. The selling price was 98p, with Wilkinson keeping 35% of that (approximately 30p after VAT). “It’s not as if I’m retiring to the Bahamas. I still work full time. It’s some extra money but it’s not a life-changing amount – not yet.”

via Kindle the fire to self-publishing | Money | The Guardian.

After 40 years of successful book publishing, Blackstaff Press is marking its special birthday by recognising just how much the publishing industry has changed over the last four decades – with the launch of its first eBook list.

This digital list will initially include three new titles and 11 of the most important titles from its significant and successful backlist, including Sam Hanna Bell’s December Bride and John Richardson’s Dream On.

Story via Blackstaff Press enter digital age with eBook list – Business News, Business – Belfasttelegraph.co.uk.

If you find this interesting, you may enjoy our latest post about ebooks & ereaders in Ireland useful too.

Tesco Ireland is selling Amazon’s Kindle reader in store.

The store is offering both the basic fourth generation Kindle wi-fi for €115 and the third generation Kindle keyboard with 3G or €195.

The prices are only slightly more expensive than purchasing the device from the US Kindle store (as all Irish purchases must).

The Kindle units are for sale in standalone display bins along with device covers.

Online retailing giant Amazon has launched the Kindle Device and ebook store in France.

The newest Kindle eInk reader is available there for €99 but the company does not seem to have made the new touch screen Kindles or the Kindle Fire available to French customers.

The launch marks the fourth distinct Kindle store with stores having opened previous in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Yesterday Google launched its own ebook service in the United Kingdom and last week Apple finally rolled out its iBooks service to Ireland and several other European markets.

The History Press Ireland has launched its first ebook, a kindle edition of Conor McCabe’s, Sins of the Father: Tracing the Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy.

The book, something of a departure for the history publisher, is an analysis of how the Irish economy has been shaped by decisions over many decades.

The release comes as data from Aptara shows ‘all but 6% of trade publishers are currently developing e-books‘ and that ‘1 out of 5 eBook publishers generates more than 10% of their sales from eBooks‘.

The introduction of the Kindle, the biggest-selling e-reader, opens up library e-books to a wider audience, heightening the fears of publishers that many customers will turn to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits.

Library e-books are already available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, smartphones, laptops and other devices, but never on the Kindle, whose users had long complained that they were left out.

via Amazon’s Kindle to Make Library E-Books Available – NYTimes.com.

Following the success of its “Sunshine Deals” promotion, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is running an even bigger sale on Kindle books: The Big Deal, with over 900 titles on sale for $0.99, $1.99, $2.99 and $3.99 through July 27. And here’s the kicker: For the first time ever, Big 6 publishers like Random House are participating in the sale.

via Amazon’s ‘Big Deals’ Puts 900 Kindle Books On Sale – Including Big 6 Titles | paidContent.

It’s a week for Ice & Fire. The fifth book in George RR Martin’s epic series has had an amazing success across the globe and Ireland is no different. It pulled in a remarkable (for a science fiction & Fantasy title) 2,200 sales last week. What’s more, the first book of the series, although it’s sales dropped from last week, still delivered a  creditable result selling 763 units and just clinging on to its top ten place from last week.

I’d be fascinated to know what the ebook leakage figure was for Ireland for A Dance With Dragons, by that I mean, how many fans ordered the book as a digital edition either from a US or UK based services like Amazon. Considering that both the US and UK reported huge sales for ebooks editions of the title, I get the sense that there were many (I myself pre-ordered the book on my kindle and it cost me only $9.99. It is currently $19.89 for Irish readers). It is a mark of the relative protected/backward/challenged (take your pick) the Irish market is with regard to ebooks that no-one seems to be selling an ebook version at ANY Irish ebook site (of which few actually exist in any case) that I can find.

As this weekly look through has highlighted for some weeks, Fiction titles are in complete control of the top ten in Ireland and Irish authors made a valiant stab at it too. It was a good week too, with the figure for top ten sales up some 10% on the previous week. With summer reading offers still rolling you’d expect fiction to remain dominant for some time to come.

1:A Dance with Dragons:Book Five of a Song of Ice and Fire, George RR Martin, 2,200
2: All for You, Sheila O’Flanagan, 1,794
3: Minding Frankie, Maeve Binchy, 963
4: The Leopard, Jo Nesbo, 949
5: Fallen, Karin Slaughter, 912
6: One Day, David Nicholls, 911
7: Belle, Lesley Pearse, 896
8: Something from Tiffany’s, Melissa Hill, 853
9: The Reversal, Michael Connelly, 811
10: A Game of Thrones Book 1 of a Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin, 763

Top Ten Dynamics
IPN is running a top ten dynamics section looking at the top ten with some data drawn out. Nothing too dramatic, but useful nonetheless.

Volume: 11,052 Units
Increase since last week: 1074 units
% Increase since last week: -10.76%
Average Units Per Title: 1,105

~~
Fiction: 10 titles, 9,978 units or 100%, RRP £11.39
Non-Fiction: 0 titles, 0 units or 0%, RRP £0

~~
Authors: 10
Irish Authors: 3, 30%
Irish Published Books: 0, 0%

~~
Average RRP: £11.39
Increase in RRP since last week: £2.29
% Increase in RRP since last week: 10.10%*
*It is important to note that RRP does not reflect actually selling price. Much of this RRP Increase is driven by one title which had a £25.00 RRP.

Data Supplied by Nielsen BookScan taken from the Irish Consumer Market week ending 9th July 2011
Image Credit:

Some rights reserved by icantcu

Ereader shipments fell from the holiday rush to 3.3 million units, but still saw a 105 percent increase compared to last year. As for the Nook Color’s success, IDC points to Amazon’s lack of a color ereader as a reason for losing the lead sales spot. Rumors remain strong that Amazon will announce its own tablet devices in a few months, and I would imagine at least one will be an inexpensive Kindle-branded tablet/ereader device like the Nook Color.

via IDC: Tablet sales slow, Nook Color ousts Kindle as lead ereader | VentureBeat.

Yahoo Finance today reported that Amazon had agreed to acquire The Book Depository, the online book retailer that offers free delivery worldwide to customers.

The UK based company had £60 million in sales in 2010 and is targeting £120 million in 2011 according to Retail Gazette earlier this year and was founded by Andrew Crawford in 2004.

It would seem to be a case of, ‘How do you know you are doing something right? Amazon acquires you!’ In that regard the team at Book Depository should be congratulated for building such an impressive company relatively quickly.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN – News) today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire The Book Depository International. The Book Depository is an online bookseller offering over six million books for delivery worldwide.

“Customers in more than 100 countries enjoy The Book Depository’s vast selection, convenient delivery and free shipping,” said Greg Greeley, Amazon’s Vice President of European Retail. “The Book Depository is very focused on serving its customers around the world, and we look forward to welcoming them to the Amazon family.”

From Amazon’s perspective It’s hard to know what the play is here. It could be any of:

1) Increasing UK and European exposure
2) Building a better position in Australia
3) Defensive market-share building

Or any number of other things. There must be some worries about competition approval, at least in the UK, with this.

Finally, from Irish readers and book buyers view, the key will be whether Amazon changes the free postage model The Book Depository operates. If so, this could be a bad deal for those who purchase books online, though perhaps a boost to bookshops.