During Thursday’s conference call with analysts about third quarter results, Scholastic chairman Dick Robinson not only disclosed that HarperCollins will add hundreds of children’s titles to Storia, but also, without getting into too much detail, talked about how the digital sales platform is progressing. According to Robinson, Storia is meeting all of its metrics, which include the number of app downloads, registration from the downloads, and revenue. He said teachers are using Storia both for supplementary use to get free e-books and to order books for the classroom. The largest response has been from iPad users, but Robinson said numbers are growing for the Kindle Fire
The unexpectedly deep decline in Hunger Games sales, Robinson said in response to a question, was largely due to the drying up of e-book sales. The “principal falloff in sales” Robinson said, has been of the e-book side with the print editions selling steadily if at modest levels. E-book sales spiked when the movie was released, Robinson said, but have since fallen off more dramatically than print.In all of 2012, the trilogy sold 15 million print books and 12.7 million e-books.
