In its preliminary report on 2011 results, Bertelsmann pointed to "rapidly growing" e-book sales at Random House and a good performance of the advertising-driven businesses as one of the drivers for its growth. Unfortunately, the company also said, this growth was offset by other factors such as planned start-up losses for new growth platforms and the weak business performance of some of the printing operations, as well as declines in the replication and direct-marketing businesses. (via Publishers' Weekly).

Nonetheless, the line item about e-books are bound to be noted by marketers, which have been watching this channel rapidly expand.

Self Publishing is a Driver

Last year Penguin Group launched a service to help writers digitally publish their own books. Its subsidiary, Book Country, offers a range of tools from e-book conversion to cover creation – meant to market books through digital book outlets and print-on-demand operations.

Penguin is following the numbers with this move – the self-published titles have nearly tripled to 133,036 in 2010 from 51,237 in 2006, the Journal said, citing R.R. Bowker LLC.

An Active Group

One reason marketers are eying this format is because e-reader users are much more likely than non-users to have purchased books in the past year, according to Harris Poll results—making them an active user base. For example, only 6% of e-reader users purchased no books in the past year, one-sixth the 36% of non-users who did not purchase a book.

At the other end of the spectrum e-book users are about twice as likely as non-users to have purchased 21 or more books (17% compared to 8%) and 11-20 books (17% compared to 9%).

The second-largest differential, however, occurs in the percentage of consumers buying six to 10 books, which comprises 28% of e-book users but only 13% of non-users. E-book users are also slightly more likely to have bought three to five books and one-third less likely to have bought one to two books.