PaidContent has a report on Penguin’s e-book sales by way of an earnings disclosure report from 7its parent company Pearson. The report mentions that Penguin’s global e-book sales increased by 128% over the last year, and now make up 14% of Penguin’s total revenue. This growth rate is actually slower than the 160.1% annual growth reported by the American Association of Publishers for consumer e-books from January through May.
Penguin has been doing a number of things to promote e-books in recent months, such as releasing an e-books app based on its “Penguin Classics” line, and helping independent bookstores promote Google’s e-book sales platform. In April, we reported that its e-book sales had doubled over the first quarter of the previous year.
Penguin is also infamous for having the highest ebook prices – I rarely buy Penguin ebooks, if I can at all avoid it.
I’m another one who seldom buys Penguin books even though they publish some of my favorite authors. I remember last summer they released 6 of those books but they were priced so high as ebooks that I read them all from the library. It would be nice if they would experiment with some lower prices and see how much their percentage, and probably bottom line, goes up then.