Speech recognition: ebook sales thrive

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo publisher Quercus said today that Britons were embracing ebooks in unprecedented numbers, with as many as 40% of copies of some titles being sold in digital form at peak times.

Digital revenues jumped sevenfold in the first half of the year, representing more than 10% of turnover.

Chief executive Mark Smith highlighted Mark Logue's The King's Speech, the book that accompanies the Oscar-winning film, which notched up about 40% of sales in ebook format in its first three weeks.

A recent promotional tie-up with Apple also led to seven Quercus titles entering the top ten of Apple's book store.

Surging ebook sales and a wider range of titles helped push profits up slightly to £3.4 million, despite a 20% fall in revenues to £12 million because of slowing sales of Stieg Larsson's Dragon Tattoo trilogy.

Smith said: "Larsson absolutely peaked last year. We expected it to come off this year." The Larsson books still represented 35% of Quercus's trade book sales.

Quercus's newest bestseller is Peter May's crime novel The Black House after the Richard & Judy book club recommended it.