While ebooks have surged in popularity over the last few years, there’s one group that has adopted ebooks the quickest than any other group: Romance fans.

The romance genre has always sold a lot of books. And the consumers of romance are all too eager to eat up the latest titles. One big reason why, I think, romance sells so many books (aside from the “sex sells” factor) is because so many books are a part of a series. You read one, you have to read more.

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Harry Potter fans will have to wait a little longer for the ebook edition of the series to be released, originally scheduled for October 2011. The Pottermore website that JK Rowling unveiled earlier this year as her platform for all-things Harry Potter, has received more activity than it can handle.

According to this Guardian article, Harry Potter fans will be waiting until 2012 for the ebook release:

As a result, Potter’s debut in the digital book arena has been delayed until the first half of 2012, while general access to Pottermore will be in phases from the end of October. “We’ve seen really high levels of activity, and interaction with the site has been phenomenal. This affects how quickly we can give everyone access,” said the site’s official blog. “Access may be granted quickly, but please note it could also take some weeks or months, depending on demand.”

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Looks like we are finally seeing the fallout from the liquidation of Borders Booksellers. Publishers Weekly is reporting that July bookstore sales were down 4%:

The impact of the closing of Borders’s stores is starting to show up in industry numbers. According to preliminary estimates released Wednesday morning by the Census Bureau, bookstore sales fell 4.2% in July, the steepest decline in 2011. Sales dropped to $982 million from $1.02 billion in July 2010. The July decline followed a 1.9% drop in June and as a result bookstore sales for the first seven months of 2011 were down 0.5%, to $8.03 billion.

Sales for the entire retail segment rose 6.2% in July and 7.9% for the first seven months of 2011.

It will be interesting to see how bookstore sales do after the fallout from Borders comes to an end. I’m predicting print book sales will continue to decline while ebook sales will increase.

Amazon might be poised to throw yet another game changer into the world of ebooks. There are rumors that the largest online retailer wants to offer a Netflix-style subscription service for ebooks.

For a monthly and/or annual fee users can access Amazon’s library of ebooks and read a limited number of books. This subscription-based ebook store idea has been floated around for a while, but no one has yet to implement it in a way that has really connected with consumers.

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I’ve already written about how the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise will be hard to replicate. It’s one of those anomalies that comes along once in a great while.

That doesn’t mean that publishers aren’t looking for the next Harry Potter. In fact, one publisher is already hoping they found the next big thing.

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There’s more good news for ebooks: Publishers Weekly is reporting that ebook sales for the month of May jumped 147%. At the same time, print sales have continued to decline.

Not much else to say here other than I’m not surprised. I think we’ve reached the tipping point where ebooks will continue to overtake print book sales.

Here’s the brief Publishers Weekly article:

All major adult print segments—hardcover, paperback and mass market—showed a decline in sales in May, according to the AAP’s monthly sales report. While e-books showed a steep uptick of 146.9% for the month, bringing in $73.4 million in sales, adult hardcovers dropped 38.2%, adult paperbacks dropped 14.3%, and adult mass market fell 39.4%. For the calendar year, e-books brought in $389.7 million in sales, a 160.1% climb over the same period 2010.

The few bright spots for the month, on the print side, came from YA paperbacks, which saw an uptick of 4.7% for the month; university press paperbacks, up 3.4%; and religion books, which were up 21.6%.

With the release of the final Harry Potter movie, fans have little to look forward to. There’s always JK Rowling’s recently unveiled Pottermore website, and the release of the series in ebook format. But even those can take fans so far.

Let’s not forget that Harry Potter has been a multi-billion dollar franchise. It has kept kids and adults hitting the bookstores and the movie theaters.

For JK Rowling, she’ll keep raking in the cash. And with the release of the HP ebooks that she’s self-publishing, her net-worth is going to skyrocket.

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The numbers are out for April 2011: Print book sales took a dive while digital book sales continued their climb upward. Anyone else not surprised?

The American Association of Publishers (AAP) released the figures for all of their member publishing houses, which include Penguin, Random House, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster and many more.

Publishers Weekly gives the rundown:

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If there’s one thing JK Rowling is good at, it’s keeping her fans guessing about what she’s going to do next. With the new Harry Potter movie opening on July 15, the internet is gushing with new rumors.

The newest clue to more Harry Potter is the mysterious website Pottermore.com. According to Digital Spy, this could mean more Harry Potter for his legions of worldwide fans:

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Back in February Apple made waves in the publishing world by changing their App Store TOS. Basically, the new rules required publishers to remove any links within their apps to purchasing options outside the App Store environment.

This meant that Apple would get a sweet 30% cut on all (ebooks, for example) sold. Apple also said that the price must be the same as, or lower, than an out-of-app purchase. This kills any attempt content providers might make to raise in-app purchase prices to make up for the 30% Apple takes off the top.

What changed?

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