The publishing industry will likely be thankful for one of Mark Zuckerberg's New Year's resolutions. The Facebook founder and CEO, who has over 30 million followers, has launched a new book club as part of a challenge to himself, for 2015, to read a new book every two weeks.
On January 2, Zuckerberg posted on his wall about the endeavor, announcing that his first selection is Moises Naim's The End of Power. The book, released in March 2013 in hardcover by Perseus' Basic Books, is already seeing the benefits; it is currently appearing in the #1 position in all of its sub-categories on Amazon.
Zuckerberg said he will choose titles with "an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies." The young tech magnate also offered his followers the chance to join him in the reading challenge in a Facebook group called A Year of Books, which will serves as a space for discussion about the club's given selection. The group currently has over 100,000 likes.
End of Power has, to date, sold 4,700 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks an estimated 80% of print sales. The trade paperback, which was published in March 2014, has sold just over 1,100 copies through BookScan outlets.
According to Perseus, there are only a few copies of the book in the market at present, and Basic is going to be finalizing plans for a new print run later today. Basic did not know about the Zuckerberg selection until he posted it.
CEO of Perseus, David Steinberger, said the publisher would rely on digital printing to get some copies into the market immediately, and then do a traditional, and larger, offset run to ship more print copies. Although the publisher didn't have a specific time frame for when titles would hit the market, Steinberger confirmed that Perseus will be getting the title to consumers "fast."
Steinberger also acknowledged the small sales figures, to date, for the book, but said Perseus "always believed in the book and that it had a unique message for our time." He added: "We are excited Mark Zuckerberg agrees with us.”
