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A few weeks back, I did a post on the price of the top 100 ebooks . In a comment on that post, author Anthea Lawson said one of the reasons for the big increase in cheap ebooks in the top 100 could be sites like BookBub . I had never heard of BookBub, so I went and had a look at their site.   What is Bookbub? BookBub is a service that promotes limited-time discounts on ebooks. The discounted ebooks are generally $2.99 or less. BookBub claims to have over two million subscribers who receive daily emails with details of a cheap ebooks. I signed up to receive promos for science fiction and bestselling ebooks. The BookBub website also lists available ebooks. There were 26 science fiction, 65 fantasy, 9 horror, 29 mystery, and 13 action/adventure ebooks, along with ebooks in other genres listed on the website. Twenty-two of the 26 science fiction ebooks were free, down from prices ranging from 99c to $4.99. Of the four that were not free, two were $2.99, down from ...

  Blood Meridian is set in North America in the 1850’s. Most of the action takes place in Mexico. The book follows a 19 year-old boy who after a few misadventures, joins a band of men lead by the real life John Glanton, an ex-Texas Ranger. They head to Mexico to hunt down marauding Apache Indians and get paid for their scalps. They kill a lot of Indians, but then start killing Mexicans. Similar to McCarthy’s The Road , Blood Meridian reads like watching a film, with no interior monologues from the characters and very little dialogue. So a reader’s only real clue to a character’s motivations is by observing what they do. All the men in the gang appear to be amoral killers totally devoid of empathy for anyone. There are no heroes in this novel. It shows the west as an ugly violent place where only the strong and the uncompromising survive. According to Wikipedia “Academics and critics have variously suggested that Blood Meridian is nihilistic or strongly moral; a sa...

My last post analysed the prices of the top 100 selling ebooks on Amazon when I checked on the 2nd of March 2014. In the comments on that post I was made aware of some issues that might question the usefulness of the data I had collected. I will have more to say about that in my next post. But I promised that I would do the same analysis of Apple's top 100 selling ibooks from March 2nd, so here it is.  Prices of top 100 selling ibooks.      It is obvious that the majority of ibooks in the top 100 bestseller list sold for $5.99 or less. With 99c and $2.99 being the most popular prices on the list. It is interesting that only four were priced from $6.99 to $8.99. But then there were seven at $9.99, five at $11.99 and eight at $12.99. So some readers obviously want cheap ibooks while others are willing to pay more.  In three previous surveys only a few books on the list were 99 cents, but this time there were 17 at that price. The number sel...