Actually, half of all iPad Books are Fiction

Suggestions to my previous post inspired me to normalize our metadata¹ for titles available through the U.S. iBooks app. A comment prompted me to rollup iBooks publishers into publishing conglomerates²:

Comments from other readers gave me the idea to map the 100+ iBooks categories to the more familiar BISAC categories. Doing so means over half of all iBooks titles are Fiction³:

The distribution of titles across the BISAC categories varies by publisher. For example 64% of Macmillan’s titles are Fiction, while 19% of HarperCollins are in the Religion category:

[Click HERE to enlarge.]

I also computed the MEAN price per paid title within a (BISAC) category⁴, for each of the major publishers. Click HERE for details.

(1) Data for this post includes titles available through the U.S. iBooks app from 4/15 through 5/4/2010.

(2) In creating the equivalent chart for my previous post, I didn’t include titles from Project Gutenberg.

(3) Share of the major FICTION categories can be found HERE.

(4) Even with the BISAC categorization, Cookbooks is one of the higher-priced categories.