An epublishing newsletter, eBOOKNEWSER, has announced that the publisher HarperCollins UK had 100,000 ebooks downloaded from its website on Christmas Day. This figure excluded US sales but included sales from the UK, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Forgive me, but I do find this hard to believe. I know Rupert Murdoch runs a large organisation that has in the past been accused of being somewhat cavalier with the actualité, but I believed HarperCollins was relatively insulated from the rot creeping through its parent company News International.

I’m surprised buyers chose to go to the HarperCollins website to make their ebook purchases rather than trying an online bookseller such as Foyles, Waterstones or the Hive, or even that one named after some big river. I assume the buyers knew they only wanted ebooks published by HarperCollins, and not from any other publishing house.

Full marks to HarperCollins for getting media coverage for this statement. I would have binned the press release, or at the very least questioned its veracity. You might spot that I’m a bit sceptical about the claim, and with some reason.

Our publishing division Heritage Ebooks had a huge double page spread in the Daily Telegraph over Christmas, and another double page spread the following day in the Daily Express. As a result, we sold a few ebooks through our site heritage.co.uk.

Of course I was disappointed — what’s the point of publicity, after all? So I checked our sales on the Amazon.co.uk website. Amazon UK has sold eleven times as many Heritage Ebooks as our own site has over the same period of time. It’s a shame, because we and our photographers make far more money when the ebooks are sold through heritage.co.uk, but at least they’re sales.

Is HarperCollins UK really telling the truth about 100,000 ebook sales EXCLUDING the USA on one day?

Come on!

Oh, and a Happy New Year to you all!

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