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Foyles and Nielsen Book have called for greater co-operation from publishers regarding information for both selling and monitoring e-book sales.
Becky Jones (pictured), head of e-commerce at Foyles, told delegates at The Bookseller's Digital Conference, FutureBook, sponsored by Wiggin and held in London last week, that current e-book bibliographic data was "poor". She said: "Many have no jackets and no book synopsis. Many are supplied without information such as author or publication date."
She added: "Random House is a fantastic publisher and does a great deal in the e-book market here, but when The Lost Symbol came out it failed to put either 'Dan' or 'Brown' in the file information."
Jones added a lack of information about Digital Rights Management has also caused problems and confusion among consumers. "You can't tell customers how much of the book you can print out and how many readers you can put it on—this is really not appropriate."
Peter Mathews, publishing and editorial services manager at Nielsen Book, said Nielsen was "finding it difficult to get co-operation from publishers". Nielsen BookScan does not yet produce bestseller charts for e-books. He explained: "You cannot provide sales information without product information. In order to count the sales of e-books we need to be able to identify the products themselves. We collect ISBNs—which is useless information unless you can put it with the product information."
Mathews added Nielsen had been speaking to publishers about getting the appropriate information for the last three years, but suspected that only around 20% of e-book publishers currently submitted the correct data.
He added: "We're not that far away from having a credible panel of information—perhaps a bestseller chart. We would hope that with co-operation from a few more publishers we would have significant coverage of e-book records."
Mathews said he hoped that 2010 would see the emergence of the first Nielsen e-book bestseller chart.