Several titles that in print form included supplemental material on CD or DVD are being repackaged to more clearly indicate where that supplemental material can be found for ebook customers, and those titles will be added to the iBookstore gradually in the coming weeks.

For now iBooks availability is limited to the US and Canada, though our intention is to make the full catalog of titles from O’Reilly, Microsoft Press, and all of our digital distribution clients available in every territory with an iBookstore. Unfortunately, for now iBooks does not support updates for ebooks, but each title includes information about how to upgrade your iBookstore purchase with oreilly.com for $4.99 to get access to additional DRM-free formats and free lifetime updates.

We track which of the formats customers actually download, and from the start PDF has been the dominant choice, though as the chart below shows, there’s been a steady shift toward other formats, especially the open EPUB format (which can be read on nearly every ereader device, and is the format used by Apple’s iBooks reader).

In some cases, customers download multiple formats, but this data just includes total downloads by week for each format, and goes all the way back to June of 2008.

Update: In response to the comment thread, I’ve added a second version of the graph, overlaid with the running average total downloads. I’m not able to share actual download numbers at this time, but I hope this makes the original more interesting/useful.

Speculation abounds that Amazon is planning their own storefront for selling Android apps, one in which they, not the developers, will set the price and decide which apps to feature (and which apps to exclude from the store all together). It’s a shrewd move and smart strategy for Amazon, though its impact on app sellers is less certain.

Unlike the iOs App Store, the terms of sale for the Android Market have always been non-exclusive — meaning developers are free to sell their Android apps in other places (we’ve taken advantage of that by including Android apps in many of our ebook bundles on oreilly.com, sold alongside access to PDF, EPUB, Mobipocket, and DAISY formats). Initially I wasn’t clear what Google’s intent was by taking that route, especially since parallel markets of any scale would mean developers needed to agree to terms with multiple marketplaces. But Amazon’s entrance actually makes sense for Google as well as for Amazon and likely for many app sellers.

Android’s open nature has driven its popularity among users (Google says they activate upwards of 100,000 new devices a day), as well as among carriers and device makers, but that openness has a price — carriers in particular have modified it to both forcefully include their own “crapware” software that cannot be removed (except by doing things to the phone that likely void your warranty) and to forcefully exclude apps they don’t want on their network (the Skype app isn’t available in the Android Market on T-Mobile phones).

While the carriers likely see the current situation as an opportunity to build their own tightly controlled versions of the Android Market, that non-exclusivity opens the door for companies that (a) know retailing and merchandising much better than Google, (b) aren’t in the awkward position of having to play nice with the carriers, and (c) have a global presence independent of carrier coverage and relationships. Enter Amazon.

Though we’ve taken issue with Amazon around the rendering quality of Kindle (and for their stubborn insistence on a proprietary ebook format), they’re a phenomenal ecommerce company, and I buy more from them (especially via their iPhone app married with Amazon Prime) than I’d care to acknowledge. Before iTunes went DRM-free, Amazon is where I bought most of my music. Even our ebook bundles are actually served up to customers via Amazon’s cloud storage and delivery software.

The current Android Market — actually Markets, since several carriers have customized it to their own ends — have a long way to go to match the customer and seller experience of iOs. Amazon knows ecommerce better than just about anybody, and the kind of collective intelligence filtering they brought to books would be a big leap forward for app discovery. But I’d caution developers eager to get their apps in front of more buyers via an Amazon store to carefully review the terms and conditions to make sure they’re entering a relationship with a retailing behemoth like Amazon with both eyes open.

Although we (and our authors!) had hoped that Amazon would update the software on those Kindles (especially since many O’Reilly readers are also typically early adopters of new devices and technologies), it’s clear that Amazon is focusing their efforts on their newer devices and apps for other mobile devices like iPad and Android.

Amazon won’t disclose any data about how many customers use specific Kindle devices or apps, but we believe the number of Kindle 1 users is a small and shrinking part of the overall Kindle user base, and since there are multiple additional apps and desktop readers from Amazon, with a few specific exceptions we’re now making the full catalog of O’Reilly and Microsoft Press ebooks sold at oreilly.com also available in the Kindle store. We submitted the files to Amazon early last week, and they’ve begun appearing in the store today.

Another unfortunate limitation with Kindle (though not unique to Amazon) is that they don’t offer any way of providing customers who purchase ebooks access to publisher updates. We regularly update our ebooks to correct errata and make other changes, and free updates are one reason many O’Reilly readers come to oreilly.com for their ebooks. So we’re now extending a special offer to buyers of our books on Kindle to upgrade to the full ebook bundle (which includes multiple DRM-free formats including PDF and EPUB along with free lifetime updates) for $4.99 through oreilly.com. Information on how to take advantage of that offer is included within the Kindle ebooks, and we’ve also posted instructions for how to add a .mobi file from your O’Reilly account onto a Kindle device. Here’s a few screenshots from the latest batch of titles added to the Kindle store (more at the bottom of this post):

There are still some titles that aren’t suitable for a reflowable format like EPUB or Mobipocket; titles such as the “Head First” series of books, or certain digital photography titles. But any ebook available in EPUB from oreilly.com (which is over 1,000 titles when including Microsoft Press) should now be available in the Kindle store, or will be shortly.

All O’Reilly and Microsoft Press ebooks sold in the Kindle store are unencrypted and DRM-free, and can be used with any device or reading app that supports the Mobipocket format.

Thanks to Sanders Kleinfeld and Adam Witwer for their substantial work dealing with the limitations and quirks of the proprietary Kindle format to make the reading experience for these ebooks the best it can be.

Ebooks will be a hot topic on the agenda at next month’s TOC Frankfurt and at TOC New York coming up in February 2011. Registration is open for both events.

Although the DRM-free EPUB files in our ebook bundles are compatible with many reading systems for print disabled customers, many readers prefer the DAISY format that Bookshare provides, and either don’t qualify for access via Bookshare, or would prefer to pay for the ebooks. Through a collaboration with Bookshare, today we’ve started making DAISY files available within our ebook bundles on oreilly.com for more than 800 titles. If you’ve already bought an oreilly.com ebook, you can find the DAISY files on your account page at members.oreilly.com or oreilly.com/e on a mobile device.

Our mission at O’Reilly is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators, and making our books available in accessible DAISY format helps us accomplish that mission.

There’s more details on the DAISY format from the DAISY Consortium, including a list of software and hardware reading systems.

Because I’m sure these will come up again, I’ve prepared a handy table outlining what we look for in an ideal ebook reseller, and provided a simple scorecard showing how several current ebook resellers stack up:

It’s no surprise that promotional pricing increases sales; the balancing act is in making sure that overall revenue increases (offsetting the per-unit revenue decrease) as well as making sure that other sales aren’t cannibalized. If done right, promotional pricing is a powerful way to perform price discrimination — in particular converting people who would not otherwise buy at the higher price into paying customers at a lower one.

Since implementing several promotions (first an “ebook upgrade” offer back in October and then the “Deal of the Day” starting in January, followed by a “Buy X, get X free” offer in April), overall ebook revenue has increased significantly along with unit sales, even though per-unit revenue for a particular promotion is lower. Here’s the relative print/ebook revenue breakdown since January of 2008:

In fact, for the month of April, 23 of the top 25 selling titles from oreilly.com had more than 90% of their sales in ebook format. Obviously that’s driven heavily by the promotional offers, but it’s an indication that the flexibility to do more nuanced pricing promotions than would be possible with physical product is a benefit of ebooks well worth extensive experimentation. (Note also the uptick in print sales — April was up 26% on March for print sales on oreilly.com, presumably driven in part by the increase in traffic coming for the ebooks.)

The data above doesn’t include the promotion we ran on May 21, when we extended the “$9.99 Deal of the Day” to any title — our servers metaphorically melted from the demand, which far exceeded our expectations, driving more than a 20-fold increase in sales over a typical day. Here’s a graph showing the resulting sales spike:

Although that graph makes the days leading up to May 21 look low, they’re just low relative to May 21 — ebook sales have been tracking well above a 100% increase over 2009. It’s nice to see aggregate statistics like those provided by the IDPF, but it’d be great to see more publishers share this kind of direct data. There are often understandable limits about the specifics that can be disclosed (note the dollar scale has been removed from the charts above), but making even obfuscated data more public reduces the control over perception held by those putting out numbers framing things in their own best interest.

Writing (and “publishing”) are among the most relevant and appropriate tasks to which we can turn to software developers for insight. After all, no one (no one) does as much collaborative and distributed writing, editing, and revising of complex, interrelated, long-form textual works than software developers. It’s only natural they’d build tools to make the associated tasks easier and the problems more manageable.

I am not saying that everyone can, should, or will use the same tools that developers use today. But I do think Hugh is right on the mark to look toward something like WordPress as being in the right direction (as opposed to Word or InDesign, however hacked). I’d go a step further and suggest looking at GitHub as a model to examine very closely for ways to provide the infrastructure for easy and effective distributed collaborative writing (and ‘publishing’), as well as enable the social recognition and validation that are so important for many authors.

(I’d also like to think our own Open Feedback Publishing System is a step forward in the evolution of web-based book writing tools, though for now it requires authors write using DocBook XML or AsciiDoc, a high bar for non-technical writers.)

A recent look at the latest numbers underscore the tremendous growth in digital book sales, but they also don’t tell the full story. Early this year I posted how our 2009 ebook sales were up 104% on 2008, which itself was more than 50% up on on 2007:

Now barely a third of the way into 2010, we’ve just about beat 2009 full-year revenue, and at the current run rate we’ll end up about 200% up for 2010:

Here’s the geographic breakdown for all of our iPhone app sales, which have remained consistent at roughly 55% non-US sales:

The first question many within O’Reilly asked about these numbers when I first shared them on an internal mailing list is whether these sales are coming at the expense of print sales. Is there some cannibalization of people buying ebooks instead of print books? I’m sure there is. Then again, to the extent that those customers buy that ebook direct from us (and oreilly.com is by far our biggest downloadable ebook channel), I personally prefer that to a print sale, because it’s a relatively profitable one, even priced less than the printed book (because there are much lower direct costs associated with printing, shipping, and distribution). While it’s still true that the bulk of the cost of producing and selling a book are in the product development and marketing (rather than the individual unit cost of manufacturing), strong digital sales give us that many more units over which to amortize those often substantial fixed costs.

Everything I’ve seen so far says to me that the market for digital books is growing (particularly overseas) and the flexibility we have on pricing for promotions (like our deal of the day) is converting impulse buyers (both foreign and domestic) and rewarding them with immediate and flexible (DRM-free) access.

So what’s driving those strong numbers for English-language books overseas? I have a few theories, including:

• Something that used to be very expensive (with shipping charges) now seems reasonably priced, and can be had immediately, without waiting days or weeks.
• English is the default language for business and technology, which means it’s becoming the default “second language” in most business and technical contexts. In the past two years I’ve talked with developers from Scandinavia, China, Russia, Italy, and Brazil, and all of them consume (and want more access to) O’Reilly books in English.
• Just as the printing press greatly expanded the reach of printed material (at the same time it “de-valued” the manuscript by several orders of magnitude), the mobile web is expanding the reach of digital media into new hands that would not otherwise have access to the information in print or on a PC.

I’ve linked to it a few times before, but I can’t recommend enough Mary Meeker’s deck from last fall’s Web 2.0 Summit for a data-driven look at the global growth of the mobile web, including a look at what it means for media companies.

Last year’s first-ever TOC Frankfurt turned out better than we’d even hoped, with a 400-strong sellout crowd representing a diverse range of international publishers. We’ve lined up a bigger venue (which we hope will also help address some of the glitches faced around room size last year), and are thrilled to be teaming up again with the Frankfurt Book Fair to put on TOC Frankfurt the day before the start of the Book Fair.

Because it’s still a relatively small event, we’re not doing a full-scale Call for Proposals, but we’ve set up a simple web form for submitting session and speaker ideas as we begin program planning. I’ll be working closely with TOC Community Manager Kat Meyer to develop the program, and we’re eager to include fresh voices, particularly those with a perspective from outside the US and UK.

The form will be open until the end of June, and we’ll announce the program soon after.

Click here to submit session/speaker ideas for TOC Frankfurt 2010

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