App Annie Repurposes Its Mobile App Analytics Platform For EBooks, Launches Tools For Authors & Publishers

E-books have a lot in common with apps, as it turns out. They’re locked to devices, and sold through mobile marketplaces where their rise and fall in top charts has a lot to do with pricing changes, featured promotions, and other metrics worth tracking in a more dynamic way. Today, mobile app analytics firm App Annie is stepping up to do that tracking with the launch of a new product line aimed at authors, publishers, marketers and agents which the company is calling, simply, “App Annie for eBooks.”

The expansion comes less than a month after the company’s announcement of $15 million in Series C funding, which the firm hinted at the time would be used for continued development of its analytics platform. Its analytics platform today is used by app developers, publishers, enterprise customers, and even investors and journalists looking to gain an insider’s view into the ever-changing mobile app market.

With App Annie for eBooks, the company hopes to produce a similar success story in a new vertical. Much like mobile app publishers today, e-book customers will now gain access to a free online dashboard where they can track their own eBook sales and downloads, including things like revenues, download numbers, and rankings. In addition, App Annie will provide other options like email reports, downloadable file reports, and in the near future, a mobile application.

In addition to basic analytics, publishers can also track customer feedback (ratings and reviews) on a country-by-country basis, as well as find out where and how e-books are being discovered through the App Annie “Featured Tracker” tool. This will tell publishers when their e-book is included on iBookstore “featured” pages, detailing the date of that featured listing, the country, and associated inventory.

Meanwhile, a second component to the eBooks platform, “Store Stats,” will offer users a view into the e-book marketplace as a whole, offering rankings, ratings, and featured selections across countries, categories and time – again, much like what App Annie provides today for mobile apps.

The site currently indexes the Amazon Kindle store and the Apple iBooks store, and plans to include other e-book marketplaces in the future. To get started with the new service, e-book publishers only need to create an App Annie account using their iBooks (iTunes Connect) or Amazon account information in order to begin tracking their personal business analytics. After the initial setup, the data is kept up-to-date automatically going forward, so publishers have the most recently available information in one dashboard.

App Annie today is tracking data on over 300,000 applications for over 125,000 app developer customers, and says that the eBook industry is growing quickly as well, with one report from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicting $8.2 billion in eBook sales by 2017, overtaking audiobooks and print.

Interested authors and publishers can sign up for App Annie for eBooks here.