Bestsellers image by Denise VegaI was intrigued by “The Bestselling Children’s Books of 2012” in Publisher’s Weekly (March 17) and wanted to take a closer look at some aspects of the e-book list. E-book sales start with 200,000+ in sales and work their way down to 25,000+. There are 153 books on the list. Here are some fast facts:

  • Of the 7 books in the 200,000+ category, three spots are held by The Hunger Games Trilogy and two by the Divergent trilogy.
  • The Hunger Games trilogy has sold 12.7 million e-books.
  • Rick Riordan’s Olympians series sold 1.27 million e-books.
  • The Twilight series sold almost half a million e-books.

Not surprisingly dystopian/fantasy/paranormal/otherworldy books dominate all lists (paper and e-).

Some delightful surprises (for me) on the list:

  • The Borrowers by Mary Norton (56,364)
  • Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (41, 347)
  • Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate deCamillo (35,589)
  • Holes by Louis Sachar
  • A couple of Ivy and Bean books by Annie Barrows, illus. by Sophie Blackall (28,618)
  • And one lone picture book! (unless I missed something): Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker, illus. by Tom Lichtenheld. (25,000)

There were a few other non-dystopian etc books, but I didn’t include them here because I think kids may be buying them for school reading assignments (and a few in the above list might be reading assignments as well). As more students have e-readers and tablets, I think e-book sales will increase.

As for the picture book (which is a favorite of mine), this is a static e-book, not an app or anything fancy, so that’s pretty amazing.

I will continue to keep an eye on children’s e-book sales. How many e-books are on your device? How many are free vs. purchased? Do you have a maximum price that you won’t go over for an e-book?

x  Powerful Protection for WordPress, from Shield Security
This Site Is Protected By
ShieldPRO
https://www.denisevega.com/friday-focus-childrens-e-books/
www.denisevega.com
CC-MAIN-2024-10
173493
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UWCYOWNK3BG4XVQJNAGJC4NU74RGXETA
<urn:uuid:5e8796b7-062b-4809-922f-6cd502dc9f18>
2024-02-22T05:08:27Z
104.247.75.249
text/html
sha1:YDNQTFE633A7ZWT4LLZOULEYELUWCX7L
<urn:uuid:2d302025-3f85-4cba-949a-fbf733fe0cd4>
https://www.denisevega.com/friday-focus-childrens-e-books/
response
<urn:uuid:512a9aa6-3947-4f1d-93cb-0ba552f9a887>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-10
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February/March 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-154
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/