Humble Bundle: e-book revenue 2014-2015
Humble Bundle e-book revenue – additional information
Humble Bundle is a digital platform for purchasing collections of games, e-books and music. The collections or bundles are DRM-free and are only available for a limited period of time. The platform has a unique pricing concept: users can pay what they want for the games or e-books, starting from the price of one U.S. dollars. Part of the money received from the purchase is used to pay game developers and authors; part of it goes to a chosen charity. Child’s Play, American Red Cross, Wikimedia Foundation and charity:water are a few charities supported by the Humble Bundle.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the company started in 2010, and was initially just a game distributor. As of February 2015, Humble Bundle was the third most popular gaming site in the U.S., only behind GameStop and Pogo.com. So far, the most successful bundle to date was the Humble Origin Bundle, which ran from August 13 to August 27, 2013, and raised more than 10.38 million U.S. dollars. Humble Indie Bundle V, which ran from May 31 to June 13, 2012 and generated more than 5.1 million U.S. dollars, is the second most successful bundle.
The Humble e-book Bundle went live in October of 2012. The platform includes titles from major authors – Mercedes Lackey, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow to name a few – and different book genres. The revenue generated by Humble Bundle e-books increased from 4.75 million U.S. dollars in 2014 to just over six million U.S. dollars in 2015. E-book is a promising market, as this particular format is forecast to account for about a quarter of the total book sales in the world by 2018. In the U.S., sales of e-books are forecast to generate around 8.7 billion U.S. dollars by 2018.