Most kids still haven’t read an ebook.

46 percent of kids have read an ebook, up from 25 percent in 2010. (That’s actually a higher percentage than their parents: 41 percent of parents had read an ebook, up from 14 percent in 2010.) This means, of course, that 54 percent of kids still haven’t read one.

57 percent of girls who had never read an ebook said that they wanted to, compared to 46 percent of boys. I asked Scholastic if the company also broke down the percentage of children who had never read an ebook by gender, and they did: 52 percent of the kids who’d never read an ebook were boys and 48 percent were girls. Based on the survey’s sample size, Scholastic says, this difference wasn’t statistically significant.

Huge growth in reading on tablets.

The most popular device for e-reading was a laptop or netbook, which 22 percent of children surveyed had used to read an ebook. The largest growth came from tablets — not surprising since the iPad launched in 2010, the last time this survey was conducted.

Kids claim they’d read more if they had more access to ebooks.

“I really need an iPad so I can read more,” wily children tell gullible parents. Just kidding! Although possibly a factor here.

Kids want a dictionary and note-taking features.

I loved this breakdown of the features that kids want versus the features that adults want in children’s ebooks. When you look at this, it becomes clear that many children’s ebook startups have been built around features that parents want (like “read-along” options and reading time tracking) — and it looks as if, in fact, kids are more interested in standard e-reading features like highlighting and note-taking.

The full report is here as a free PDF.

“The Hunger Games” is published by Scholastic, which reported in July that the trilogy has sold over 50 million copies in the United States. Amazon did not break out how many copies it has sold.

“Since debuting in 2008, Katniss Everdeen and the Hunger Games have taken the world by storm, much as Harry Potter did a decade before,” Sara Nelson, Amazon.com editorial director of books and Kindle, said in the release. “Interestingly, this series is only three books versus Harry Potter’s seven, and to achieve this result in just four years is a great testament to both the popularity of the work and, we think, the growth in reading digitally during that time. Customers love these books and all three titles are consistently on our Top 10 lists in both print and Kindle formats, and The Hunger Games is also the most-borrowed book in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.”

Amazon UK announced earlier this month that E. L. James, author of erotic trilogy “50 Shades of Grey,” is Amazon UK’s bestselling author of all time, beating Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling.

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty (Penguin/Riverhead)

What it’s about: Silent movie star Louise Brooks, at age 15, is accompanied by 36-year-old Cora Carlisle from Wichita to New York. The trip changes both of them. This week the book is #12 on the New York Times  ebook bestseller list and #21 on the USA Today list, with digital copies outselling print.

How the book hit the NYT list: The Chaperone, published on June 5, hit the NYT hardcover extended list earlier this summer and was chosen as USA Today‘s #1 hot fiction pick. But the ebook is seeing renewed success now because it was chosen as the Kindle Daily Deal on July 8 and was sold for $2.99. It’s now back to its digital list price, $12.99.

The Chaperone on … Amazon Kindle | Apple | Barnes & Noble Nook | Google  | Kobo | Sony

And don’t miss…

• Scholastic’s fourth-quarter earnings rose, due in large part to the success of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian trilogy The Hunger Games. Scholastic announced that the trilogy has sold over 50 million print and digital copies in the U.S.; the bestselling book of the three is still The Hunger Games, with over 23 million copies sold.
• Last week I featured Colleen Hoover’s self-published YA romance Slammed. It’s still on the NYT ebook bestseller list at #13 (and the USA Today list at #22), and now its sequel, Point of Retreat, is on the NYT ebook list too, at #19.
  

New York Times bestseller list, week of 7/29/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 7/21/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

In its latest “quick report” (PDF), the Cooney Center studied 32 child-parent pairs. The kids were all between 3 and 6 years old. Half the pairs read a print book and a regular e-book and the other half read a print book and an enhanced e-book (defined as an e-book with “enhanced multimedia experiences” like games and other interactive features, and the focus of reading apps like Scholastic’s Storia and Ruckus Reader).

Kids who read enhanced e-books remembered “significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story.”

And “both types of e-books, but especially the enhanced e-book, prompted more non-content related actions (e.g., behavior or device focused talk, pushing hands away) from children and parents than the print books.” This will be familiar to anyone who has ever used an iPad with a kid (or adult) and pointed out a cool iPad-related feature.

The Cooney Center recommends that “parents and preschool teachers should choose print or basic e-books to read with children if they want to prioritize literacy-building experiences over ones intended ‘just for fun,’” and says enhanced e-book designers should “exercise caution when adding features to enhanced e-books, especially when those features do not directly relate to the story.”

It also notes that enhanced e-books can be a good tool to “prompt less motivated young readers toward engagement when they might otherwise avoid text altogether.”

via Digital Book World

Here’s 1,191 U.S. publishers’ net sales for February 2012, compared to February 2011:

Hunger Games is selling so well, in fact, that Scholastic increased its earnings guidance this week. The movie was released March 23, so we’d expect to see even strong YA sales reflected in AAP’s March stats (which will be released next month).

The AAP notes that adult e-book growth in February 2012 appeared to slow (adult e-book sales were only 9.9 percent higher this February than last February) because February 2011 included “an unusual one-off retail revenue transaction” making sales that month “abnormally high.” The AAP was also collecting data from many, many fewer publishers last February (under 100 compared to 1,191 now) so it may indeed be true that adult e-book sales are flattening — but we’d need more than a month of data to deduce that.

Note that adult hardcovers sold well this February — a 25.5 percent increase over last year. And religious e-books continued to show strong growth, with those sales up 49.2 percent over last year, though the total sales are still relatively small at $7.6 million.

Ruckus Reader titles can be downloaded individually, or parents can buy access to the whole library for $24.99 for six months. The first title in a series is free; after that, titles are $3.99 each or 2 for $5.99. For now, Ruckus Reader offers 25 titles — a mixture of interactive “iReaders” (enhanced e-books with video and games), straight e-books and “vidReaders” (video books narrated by celebrities like Meryl Streep and Robin Williams). Ruckus CEO Rick Richter, formerly president of the children’s division at Simon & Schuster, told me the company expects to include around 500 titles by the end of the year.

In addition to the brand-related content it developed itself, Ruckus is partnering with other book publishers to deliver e-books as well. The first partnership is with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is providing Curious George titles. Richter said other “major publishers” are “lined up.”

How do your kid’s reading skills stack up?

“Right now, 1 in 4 kids has access to an iPad,” Richter said. “In 70 percent of households where an iPad is resident, the child has access. In 40 percent of households, kids use the iPad every day. It’s a family device.”

Ruckus Reader tracks kids’ in-app reading skills — the apps support up to 4 accounts, so parents can track more than one child on the same title — and reports back to parents with a weekly “Reader Meter” e-mail that ranks children’s mastery of “phonics and word recognition, print awareness, fluency, alphabetic knowledge, sequencing and story comprehension in real time.” The rankings are weighed against the national Common Core State Standards. “We are trying to make sense of all the options available to children in a digital age and strive to understand when screen time is delivering real educational value,” Richter said in a statement.

Through a partnership with School Library Journal, each parent e-mail includes a list of recommended print books for their child’s reading level.

Storia is in beta now and available for Windows PC through the website; an iPad version is coming later this month. The app itself is free and comes with five free e-books. A store contains over 1,000 other children’s e-books — many available in digital format for the first time — that can be sorted by grade level, reading level, age and character/series.

When the app officially launches in the fall, it will contain over 2,000 titles, reports the AP, “that can be bought directly from the publisher or from retailers.” (Scholastic’s entire list of books in print is between 5,000 and 6,000 titles, the company says.) The special “enriched” app versions of the books can only be read through the Storia app, but many unenriched e-book versions will also be available for other devices.

Some of the titles — 151 in the store now — are “enriched e-books,” which “which use word games, story interactions, and animation to deeply draw your young reader in, further developing confidence and critical thinking skills.” Parents can also track their kids’ process through the books, and the app can store multiple virtual bookshelves for children in one family.

E-books currently represent about five percent of Scholastic’s children’s book sales, the company told the AP, while at least 20 percent of the adult market is digital. E-readers are also expensive — though more are being passed down to children when their parents upgrade — and hard for young children to use. When the Storia app officially launches this fall, it will be available for Mac, iPhone and Android smartphone and tablet.

Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) are also working to enhance their e-book offerings for kids. “We are just at the dawn of digital for kids’ books,” Kevin O’Conner, B&N’s Nook Kids director of business development and content acquisitions, said at the Publishers Launch conference in January. The company’s Nook Kids storefront contains 1,626 titles.

Amazon Publishing recently bought Marshall Cavendish’s line of 450 children’s books, which it will sell in print and digital versions, but it’s not stopping there: The company sees digital as “a chance to connect a terrific group of authors and illustrators with more readers,” Amazon Publishing VP Jeff Belle said, and the “Children’s Books for Kindle Fire” section of the store contains 981 titles — a figure that has more than doubled since December.

The e-singles series is called The 39 Clues: Rapid Fire, and each story is 30 to 40 pages long and will sell for 99 cents, USA Today reports. The stories were written by Scholastic’s in-house editorial team and are all being published under the pseudonym “Clifford Riley,” who is also a character in the series.

Many publishers have experimented with e-singles, but this appears to be the first time that a children’s book publisher is trying them out. Christmas vacation is a good time to do it since kids are on vacation and a new story will be available each day for seven days. Each story leads up to “one explosive reveal,” according to the books’ Kindle pages.

“We know a lot of kids read on digital devices and a lot will be getting e-readers for the holidays,” David Levithan, publisher and editorial director of Scholastic Press, said. There are actually very few statistics about kids’ e-reading habits, and it’s unclear how many have their own e-readers, though this holiday season could mark a tipping point. Last year Scholastic published a big report on kids and reading in the digital age, and it would be great to see that report updated as e-reader prices continue to fall and the devices become more popular.

Scholastic Ruckus will publish “top children’s authors across all platforms, including print, e-books and enhanced e-books, with Ruckus Media publishing interactive story apps” of those books. “More than a dozen” projects are in development, with the first releases planned for 2012. Ruckus was not yet able to tell me what the first titles will be, but the release notes, “In addition to intellectual property from titles in the Ruckus library and new projects developed for both digital and print, Ruckus Media is aggressively acquiring rights to out-of-print backlist titles to publish in print or in e-book formats to be distributed by Scholastic under the Ruckus imprint.” Up to now, Ruckus has published 15 children’s book apps, like “The Velveteen Rabbit: Told by Meryl Streep,” and recently signed a licensing agreement with Hasbro to develop apps for the Tonka Chuck and Friends, My Little Pony and Transformers brands.

The partnership is being touted as a “transmedia imprint.” The word “transmedia,” which is thrown around a lot these days, simply means storytelling across a variety of platforms. That’s not to say that the actual process of transmedia publishing is simple–it requires adapting existing properties or creating new ones for many different platforms. The content is linked, but not identical–beyond just publishing a book in both print and digital form. One good definition comes from Fourth Story Media, the transmedia publishing company launched by former Scholastic president Lisa Holton in 2008: “We tell stories that unfold across books, the web, mobile phones, and other forms of media. We invite kids to participate in the stories they read.”

Many traditional book publishers are working on transmedia initiatives as well. Scholastic’s most notable so far has been The 39 Clues, a 10-book series with a major website game component and puzzle cards available at retail. (Lisa Holton oversaw the development of The 39 Clues before founding Fourth Story.) Random House bought digital media agency Smashing Ideas earlier this year as part of its initiative to develop original digital content, “particularly in the children’s, educational, lifestyle, and reference areas.” And, of course, there is the interactive Harry Potter e-book site Pottermore.com, which officially launches next month.