Byliner recently announced that it has sold 100,000 original e-singles, and other publishers are finding similar success with the format: The Atavist sold over 100,000 copies of ten e-singles combined last year, company CEO Evan Ratliff announced at a Digital Book World Panel this afternoon. Meanwhile, a Penguin e-single by…

OverDrive released its lists of the most-downloaded e-books from libraries in December 2011. These lists look pretty different from the current New York Times e-book bestseller lists. Here’s why, plus a few interesting tidbits.

I asked publishers and authors how they’re promoting their e-books for the holidays and got answers from bundling and free samplers to Kindle Fire giveaways. Click through to see who’s doing what.

Condé Nast cooking site Epicurious is selling Random House digital cookbooks that users can import into their “digital recipe boxes.” However, they cannot access the cookbooks they buy anywhere except through the Epicurious app and from the Epicurious website.

$9.99 is often treated as a magic price—the cost of a New York Times bestseller on Kindle back in the good old days, before big-six publishers adopted agency pricing models and ended Amazon’s discounting of their books. However, for a variety of reasons, few readers ever had the chance to…

Random House and Borders have proposed an amount the publisher is owed from the bookseller’s bankruptcy.

It is surprisingly hard for an author to know how many copies his or her book is selling. Now Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS) is giving its authors real-time access to their sales information for the first time, and Random House and Hachette Book Group just announced they will do…

This summer, Politico signed a deal with Random House to publish four instant e-books about the 2012 presidential campaign. Now Politico has opened an online bookstore, powered by Random House, selling politics and policy titles from a variety of publishers.

As election season approaches, Random House’s Crown Publishing is teaming up with political website RealClearPolitics to publish a four-book series on the campaign. Three of the books will be published only as e-books; a fourth will be published in both print and digital formats and will be released on Election…

Publishers see transmedia—storytelling across a variety of platforms—as a key part of their future strategy: With many types of entertainment competing with print books, it’s in their interest to be in as many of these areas as possible. It’s still early days, but in its new initiative to create develop…

Last September, Rick Richter, the former president of Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS) Children’s, launched Ruckus Media Group, a kids’ book app publisher. A year later, he’s teaming up with a traditional publisher again: Ruckus is partnering with Scholastic, the world’s largest children’s book publisher, to create a new imprint,…

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is moving from periodic e-book sales (like Sunshine Deals and Big Deals) into regular month-long Kindle promotions (along with its Kindle Daily Deals, launched last week). A new section of the Kindle store now offers “100 Kindle books for $3.99 or less,” selected by editors each month.…

2011 is widely believed to be a year of explosive growth for e-books, but few statistics are available yet for this year. However, here’s a pretty impressive stat from Random House: In the first half of 2011, digital sales accounted for over 20 percent of Random House’s revenues in the…

Can publishers develop the skills they need to survive in a digital world—social marketing, search engine optimization, app development—from within their companies, or do they have to hire from outside the industry?  In a Publishers Launch Conferences panel moderated by Lorraine Shanley, principal of book industry consulting and executive recruitment…

Bertelsmann AG has acquired digital media agency Smashing Ideas, Inc. for its Random House division. While the match between an established book publisher and a digital marketer seems curious at first glance, Random House and Smashing Ideas have been partners since last fall. Plus, the deal reflects the changes in…

A new high profile-backer for open source textbook firm Flat World Knowledge: Random House. The book publisher is investing an undisclosed amount in the startup as an add-on to its second round, which was announced earlier this year. The January funding round was led by Random House parent Bertelsmann through…

HMV (LSE: HMV), HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House are financing a new “social retail” service aiming to help readers find, buy and share books.

UPDATE: Random House confirmed this morning that it will make its full catalog of 17,000 e-books available on Apple’s iBookstore. Publisher Random House has announced that it is joining its competitors by adopting the “agency model” for its e-book sales. The new system will allow it to set retail prices…

Random House is working with digital media agency Smashing Ideas to create a series of children’s apps as it continues to expand its digital offerings. Earlier this year, the publisher formed a small unit to create books tied to new and existing video game titles in an attempt to compensate…