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Amazon Sells More Ebooks On Christmas Than Real Books
ctmurray writes
"Amazon reports for the first time ever they sold more ebooks on one day than real books. My wife is an ebook-only author and reported her largest single day sales on Christmas day, and December has been her best month ever as well. All those Kindles bought for this season are being seen in ebook sales."
The battle with publishers over pricing seems to be coming to the fore as well.
First, they have to prove that there is a market.
The eBooks publishing method and the actual recruitment of authors are two separate businesses. In the laster case, they have to build up an infrastructure of editors and associated staff, and even a financing arm (for advances).
They may simply not want to take the risk and capital cost to get into the publishing business, preferring to do "one" thing well: distribution.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It makes sense that ebooks would outsell regular books on Christmas.
How many people actually get online to buy regular books on Christmas day? The presents for others have already been bought. They aren't likely to get anything for themselves. Heck, unless you got a Kindle for Christmas you aren't likely to even go to the Amazon website on Christmas day. Most people are spending time with their family and enjoying the presents they DID receive. The people that are more into physical books likely got some physical books from friends or family. But the ones who got a Kindle will find it pretty useless until they put some books on it. Sure the gift giver may have put some books on there to begin with but more likely they gave them some cash or gift card to select their own books with.
I got an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, because Amazon has no mechanism to gift Kindle books (which is strangely shortsighted, but not the topic on hand...)
I did buy one book with it, but three other books I was going to buy the kindle copies were substantially more than the print copies (in one case, more than double the cost -- $19.97 versus something in the $8 range for a *hardcover*!)
I'm not sure if others have noticed, but lately Kindle books have been trending upwards in price, and its pretty common now that paperback editions are less than the Kindle copies, whereas six months ago they tended to be cheaper, if only by a nickel or something...)
I don't know if prices jumped on Christmas because they expected this, and will come back down, or if these higher prices I noticed on that day will persist into the new year. I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking -- gaming prices is a bad idea when you start getting competition that people actually are talking about.
I got a Sony PR-505 last year and have yet to purchase a single ebook.
The DRM bothers me, but there are enough python scripts running around that will strip it out of the epub/pdf formats that it's not that much of a concern.
Price is why I don't buy them. While there are a handful of public domain books worth reading (opinion) the real content is only for sale.
I just flat-out refuse to pay 50% more for the same content in basically the same format that the publisher already has filed away somewhere. When do you think the last time that a major popular author wrote out a manuscript on a typewriter was? Or longhand? You know it's already in an electronic document format somewhere.
No printing, no binding, no shipping, no stocking, no returns. No fuel, no toxic waste from the paper making process, no toxins from the inks.
Yet I get to pay 50% more?
"Booksurge allows for smaller runs of books..."
It allows for an unlimited run of ebooks. This is the issue I'm talking about. As more people purchase more books in electronic format as opposed to dead tree, big publishers will become less relevant.
There are still a number of services that a publisher can provide, and my guess would be that Booksurge and the like can or will provide them. So in a way, publishers will still exist, and they will still be a part of distribution but it is now all electronic and the payment structure will shift to reflect that.
In the last link, about the battle with publishers over pricing, it seems apparent to me that the primary leverage the publisher brings to the table is access to the markets, but that ceases to exist with digital media.
This should go without saying in any web forum, but I'm not a published author and I'm not involved in the publishing business. These are just my opinions as an avid reader and someone who spends a lot of time online. That said, I read the vast majority of my books off-line. The ebook readers and their functionality still aren't there for me. The ebooks I do read, I read on my laptop. I've never payed money for an ebook.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Seems that way, doesn't it... :)
Incidentally, I happen to agree with you that DRM, in general, is awful. But the truth is, for the most part, DRM just isn't a workable technology. So as long as an option exists for me to strip away the DRM on the content I purchase, I'm largely indifferent. That said, until it was clear that the Kindle DRM was thoroughly hacked, I was largely in the "not for me" camp. But now, I'd definitely consider it (once the price comes down a bit on the device), just as I'm happy to purchase DVDs.