Good morning.
Lenovo will join the ranks of iPad wannabes next year with its LePad tablet. Which would be interesting, except there are no details at all, on the OS, the size/form factor, or the pricing. "Early 2011" is the word, so maybe we'll hear more at CES in January.
--
As was expected given the record pre-orders, Call of Duty: Black Ops set a sales record this week, with $360 million in sales on the opening day. This beats the previous record holder, last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which hit $310 million. First-day sales of the game were 5.6 million units, Activision said, compared with 4.7 million copies of MW2 last year. (By comparison, "Halo: Reach" made $200 million in its first day this year.)
--
The New York Times announced this week that it will start counting eBook sales in its book best-seller lists. Or, more accurately, it will instead create separate eBook best-seller lists. I'm not sure why there's a distinction. A book's a book. But it's overdue either way.
E-book sales in the first nine months of 2010 were $304.6 million, up from $105.6 million from the same period in 2009, a nearly 190 percent increase.
Several major publishers said that e-books had climbed to about 10 percent of their total trade sales. Some publishing experts have predicted that they will rise to 25 percent in the next two to three years.