The UK’s leading specialist and academic bookseller, Blackwell’s, has crowned a 30% increase in sales this year with a partnership with the global personal study platform and eTextbook provider Kortext.
Kortext is acquiring Blackell’s e-learning business and together Kortext and Blackwell’s will deliver
digital learning content solutions to Blackwell’s university and student customers across the UK.
Kortext claims to be the
clear leader in supplying digital learning solutions, content and eTextbooks to UK universities,
and to be seeing
significant global adoption serving millions of students at colleges and universities across the globe.
Meanwhile Blackwell’s, in the same press release announcing the new partnership, states,
…sales have increased 30% on last year. With sales within shops and online both increasing significantly. We are the fastest growing bookseller in the UK.
Although Blackwell’s purports to be a “specialist and academic” bookseller it also offers a fair range of fiction, and the online store leads with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
A quick glance at my own paperbacks on Blackwell’s shows them to be more than double the price I set at CreateSpace, and none of them have covers. And my books are not the only titles without covers in the online store.
Given the target audience for Blackwell’s is cash-stricken British university students with heavy debt burdens I somehow can’t see myself raking in many sales from Blackwell’s this Christmas. Or at any other time.
And that’s a shame quite apart from my not making any sales myself. As an author committed to a healthy and diverse book market I try ensure my titles are available widely to support “smaller” booksellers. But that seems a waste of time in this instance.
