Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Thank you very much for the excellent article

Posted by Asif Ahmed | January 29, 2011 07:49 AM

The only trouble with this analysis is that the Harry Potter novels aren't available as ebooks in any legal form.

Posted by Ray Blake | January 29, 2011 08:26 AM

Hi There,

First of all- thanks very much for sharing this! I am always impressed with the research the Hitwise team pulls together and appreciate you sharing it with us.

I know a lot of the data you all use is proprietary but I was wondering if you might be able to share with us where the search volume is coming from? Was this directly from Amazon and other book sites, Google UK, all search engines in the UK, etc?

I would also love to know a bit more about the breakdown by individual title. For example, was one of the Harry Potter books much more searched than the others? How would any of the individual books from the Twilight and HP series hold up against some of the other individual titles?

In any event, thanks very much for sharing what you have and apologies for my curiosity! Cheers!

Posted by Sam Crocker | January 29, 2011 02:08 PM

It seems odd the #4 would be the relatively obscure "Collins Complete Photography Course" so I Googled the title. I find that the Kindle edition is available in the U.K. only, though there's a Kobo edition available in the U.S. (3rd in marketshare, well behind Amazon and Sony). A search of "'Collins Complete Photography Course' ebook" mostly offers links to sites offer illegal bit-torrent downloads.

I'd suggest that you methodology is flawed.

Posted by Thad McIlroy | January 30, 2011 10:13 AM

Thanks for your comments. If I could just make a comment on the methodology to clarify a couple of things.

(1) These searches are only concered with UK data so to answer Thad's point, it's not the methodology is flawed only that it focuses on UK search data where you can download the Collins photogaphy book.

(2) The data is based upon searches which contain the word 'ebook'. So even though you can't buy a Harry Potter Ebook for Kindle yet, there is certainly high demand for them. Perhaps I should have renamed the list "Most in demand ebooks" to clarify that this is what people want to buy.

(3) All of the data is based on searches aggregated from all of the search engines that we monitor including Google, Bing, Yahoo! and around 2,000 others! This is not searches directly from websites like Amazon, rather what people are typing into the search boxes of their search engines.

Hopefully that should clear up any confusion. In answer to your question Sam, Harry Potter was a very popular search term and would have dominated the list if I included all of the books so I restricted it to one entry. In order the most searched for Harry Potter ebooks were: (1) Deathly Hallows, (2) Order of the Phoenix, (3) Half Blood Prince, (4) Prisoner of Azkaban, (5) Philosopher's Stone, (6) Chamber of Secrets, (7) Goblet of Fire.

Posted by Robin Goad | February 15, 2011 05:35 PM

Has J.K. Rowling not been keeping abreast of the wave of ebook popularity? I've been reading ebooks for well over a decade and seldom buy anything else due to storage restrictions. It would be lovely if she would get the hint that there's a lot more money to be made selling HP as ebooks than will be lost to hackers, as she apparently believes.

Posted by Donna Mattingly | March 26, 2011 03:35 AM

It's amazing to me that JK Rowling is still refusing to release harry potter on ebooks. If you google harry potter ebooks you will get about 100 illegal ways to get them - but for some reason JK Rowling wants to make it hard for people to pay her for a legal copy.

Rich people are brilliant.

Posted by DK | March 27, 2011 06:49 AM