Mills & Boon e-books record booming sales

LONDON, UK: The guilty pleasure that is Mills & Boon romances is driving sales of electronic e-books as they allow customers to avoid the "embarrassment factor" of being seen buying and reading the racy romances.

The British publisher said electronic sales of the books have more than doubled over the last year and have now overtaken actual paper book sales.

While the company refuses to reveal the total number of downloads sold, official figures show it must be more than the 3.3 million paperbacks purchased in 2010, the Telegraph reports.

Online retailer Amazon added that the Mills & Boon title "The Temp and the Tycoon" was one of their most downloaded novels to date.

The sales have been such a success that Sony has designed a rose-pink version of its reader, complete with the Mills & Boon logo, for those proud to be seen reading the novels.

The publisher, which boasts it sells a book every four seconds, put the boom down to their early adoption of the new technology but industry commentators believe it has more to do with avoiding embarrassment.

It is the same reason why Mills & Boon's more racier cousins, erotic fiction, is seeing a rise in sales in electronic form.

Philip Stone, charts editor at the Bookseller magazine, said: "Mills & Boon are probably feeling the biggest benefit from e-books."

A spokesman for the publisher, which was founded by Gerald Rudgrove Mills and Charles Boon in Covent Garden 1908, played down the embarrassment factor.

"We were just the first UK publisher to take advantage of e-books," he said.