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E-Books Are Only 6% of Printed Book Sales
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's technology blog argues that e-book sales represent 'only six pecent of the total market for new books.' It cites a business analysis which calculates that by mid-July, Amazon had sold 15.6 million hardcover books versus 22 million e-books, but with sales of about 48 million more paperback books. Amazon recently announced they sell 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, but when paperbacks are counted, e-books represent just 29.3% of all Amazon's book sales. And while Amazon holds about 19% of the book market, they currently represent 90% of all e-book sales — suggesting that e-books represent a tiny fraction of all print books sold. 'Many tech pundit wants books to die,' argues MIT's Christopher Mims, citing the head of Microsoft's ClearType team, who says 'I'd be glad to ditch thousands of paper- and hard-backed books from my bookshelves. I'd rather have them all on an iPad.' But while Nicholas Negroponte predicts the death of the book within five years, Mims argues that 'it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of e-books will slow.'"
I thought E-books were by definition not Printed Books.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Ebooks will not be able to beat out paper books until prices come down. People are cheap and don't want to spend more for an eBook than the mass market paperback version. Drop eBook prices and watch them take off.
It is difficult to argue with the meteoric rise in ebook popularity. I'm an ebook insider, and I still buy mostly physical books. But customers really are demanding ebook version of many books. And pretending that the trend towards ebooks doesn't exist is unrealistic. I might start and stop in fits but I think the writing is on the wall (or display).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The very reason ebook prices are so high is because publishers won't let Amazon drop them further, as that would cannibalise their book sales in which they get much larger margins.
But, I doubt ebooks will ever replace books completely (at least in the foreseeable future). Books will be around a lot longer than CDs, DVDs, BDs, and many other such media.
E-Books still aren't there yet. When an E-Book as as convenient, as cheap, and as trouble free as real books, then we'll see e-books take off. But I think they've still got a way to go. Prices need to come down, the devices themselves need to get better (more durable, longer battery life, cheaper) and the software inside them needs to get much better.
Speaking only from owning a Kindle, the limitations on display imposed by are sometimes infuriating: Limited type choices, no ragged right, an orgamizational system which doesn't scale past 100mb of material, let alone the two gigs that comes onboard, (Why people moan that the kindle is not expandable I'll never understand. Aside from a wikipedia dump, who needs two gigs of text on the go!). PDF Support needs vast improvements (why, god why do you let me zoom, but only to the scales you chose for me... which are always way too wide or ten letters too narrow on academic papers?)
Annotations for academic work are important, and on the impotent keyboard they give you on the kindle, good luck. HIghlighting is slightly better, but still painful.
Having ranted though, I have to say, I still love my kindle, if for no other reason than receiving my news paper every morning electronically, combined with Instapaper for long articles.
The devices have amazing possibility, but until they improve, they won't kill the book.
The title should be, "Holy crap, an entire 6% of books sold are eBooks."
The vast majority of the reading public doesn't own an ebook reader. The vast majority of people say things like, "I like the feel of a paper book, I wouldn't want to read a novel on my computer." The fact that, despite the relative novelty of the medium, and endemic resistance to ebooks, they've already captured a sizeable percentage of the venerable book market says quite a bit about the future. And frankly I'm surprised.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Millions of people are already reading on Kindles and Kindle is the #1 bestselling item on Amazon.com for two years running. It's also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon.com.
Let me start with this; I knew someone who was close to an author (she will go unnamed) and whenever the author published a book, I was always encouraged to go up to Amazon and write a review.
I'm trying to find the original article, but a year ago Dow Jones reported that online reviews are inflated - people are way too nice.
In my experience with my own purchases, five star reviews are horribly misleading and inflated. And many times, I think they're written by shills. I now go to the 1 star reviews first (ignore the user errors and the folks who didn't like the shipping) and go up the ratings and ignore the fives. Apparently, some shills are writing 4 star reviews. Fortunately, the shills are kind of easy to spot - I'll leave that up to you figure it out - I don't want to make my buying harder than it is.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Am I the only one who prefers reading real books?
I stare at a computer screen enough.
a
Ebooks are great for quick fact checking, but if Im reading 100+ pages I'd prefer a paper book. Its just easier on the eyes.
--
Windows Media Codec Pack
We have to remember that it is possible that, in the current market, due to markup costs, eBooks may be selling for less than they cost per unit.
The only metrics that matter to the consumer are price and utility.
The only metrics that matter to the writer are profit and control.
The only metrics that matter to the middleman (book publisher, distributor) are profit per unit.
We can't compare apples to oranges. We can't use Gross Sales Price, since many books sell for less, due to markdowns and returns in the distribution channel. We need Net price after costs, including tech support and returns, and capital requirements.
If we sell one eBook for $5 million but it gets copied electronically so that we make no other sales, and this electronic version reduces physical book sales by a larger amount (due to piracy), then we lose money.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'd love to buy some e-books, but I don't want any of the DRM restrictions they come with. I can't sell an e-book online once I've read it, I can't give it away to a friend, I can't check out an e-book from the public library unless the publisher allows it, and often I can only copy my e-books onto a limited number of my own devices. While I expect e-books will someday become the standard for book publishers, I don't want to be part of that future unless and until these DRM issues are resolved. Publishers have little motivation to do so, which means I'll likely remain a technological dinosaur with respect to books and will never own a Kindle or whatever device has replaced it in the future.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I am liking the trend (started primarily by Paizo) of role-playing companies that give Print + PDF bundles for their books. I love having access to reference PDFs on my laptop. When regular ebooks start coming bundled with hardcovers or at a more reasonable price, they will definitely take off. As it is, who wants to pay more than a softcover price for a novel?
Got Apathy?
Lots of factors here. I know I won't buy a book while it's tied to a machine or even several machines let alone the installation of the operating system on a machine. I know I'm not the only one. I suspect that's a huge factor. It isn't reasonable that if I lose or damage my reader, my entire library is wiped out. Is it any wonder that if people are asleep reading in bed or reading in the bath or on the toilet that they don't want to risk an expensive device AND their entire library whereas risking a single paperback or hardback book is acceptable? Imagine rolling over in bed and killing not only your poor reader but $5000 in books. Stuff that for a joke.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The very reason ebook prices are so high is because publishers won't let Amazon drop them further, as that would cannibalise their book sales in which they get much larger margins.
This NYTimes article broke down prices of ebooks -- showing that a $10 ebook nets them about as much profit as a $26 hardcover. It goes on to suggest that they're keeping prices high to slow down adoption -- their whole infrastructure is built around dead-tree books right now, and they fear they won't be able to adapt fast enough to scale down their own DTB-related costs. I suspect though, that when they do figure out how to scale down, they'll be just as happy keeping the prices high.
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
I agree, to an extend. The real thing the publishers fear is the loss of control. On Amazon's ebook store, there are many self-publishing authors there. Publishers get zero for their books. If this were to catch on, the major publishing houses would die. So, they do everything they can to marginalize the ebooks. Now, it's true that many self-published authors aren't worth reading...but there are several that are, and who I enjoy. But ultimately? The candle-makers guilds did not stop the lightbulb, and the buggy-whip makers did not stop the automobile. Both these industries still exist, but in very different, and much smaller, forms than they did before.
I work for a medium sized book publisher and like many others we are scrambling to put e-books out. Six percent sounds about right, last year it was 4 and the year before that it was zero. From a publisher's perspective, we're still waiting to see how it all pans out. The suspicion is that this growth rate won't maintain itself and that there's a plateau somewhere. Where that is, no one knows, but no one that I know of in the industry is predicting any sort of e-book takeover in the next decade or two. So yes there's huge growth but no one's getting rid of their printers just yet. Publishers love e-books: no shipping, no warehousing, and most importantly no returns. Most books are sold to retail outlets on the basis that they can return them for a full refund if they don't sell. Since getting shelf space can boost sales you often see titles with an over 50% return rate. Also, for very little money you can take titles that are out of print or didn't sell well and put them out there. Titles once thought dead can now eek out a few extra sales.
When E-books cost MORE than some hardcovers of course they don't sell. Put them back under $9.99 and I'll stop torrenting and begin purchasing again! The publishers are trying to use E-Books to support their print overhead - and have said as much. MacMillan and others are thieves so far as I'm concerned. As soon as they began setting prices vs Amazon the cost of E-books went through the roof. that they try to make them sound like a bargain because they cost less than LIST hardcover even though they cannot be traded, shared, or sold is a sad sham. some authors are starting to go it on their own and skip the publishers altogether - I wish some of the authors *I* like would do that. You know it's sad when a published author makes MORE money going through Amazon direct and selling for a pittance than they do going through a publisher!
Some reading:
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com/
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
http://www.teleread.com/drm/macmillan-ceo-tells-his-side-of-amazon-spat/
http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ Make sure to read ALL of the entries in this one - there are some truly stunning doozies! I wonder what planet this moron comes from?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I don't spend my whole life near a store that sells batteries or power outlets. I travel by bus, train, plane. That's where I want books, because there it's useless to depend on any technology more advanced than. "Flip to the bookmark, read." Real books are just an amazing technology!
Can I light a sig ?
a $10 ebook nets them about as much profit as a $26 hardcover
That doesn't come as a surprise. The paperback version of a book is often cheaper than the ebook!
With a paper book, no one is going to take it from you unless you get mugged, and then, what kind of mugger takes your books? Maybe I'll start spending money on ebooks when I'm guaranteed they're really mine. But that will never happen.
3 years ago, ebooks were less than 1%. Now they're 6%. That's a phenomenal growth rate of 500%. The ebook market is exploding!! Buy some Amazon shares now while they're cheap!!
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
I also own a Nook. I've been very happy with it, but I've always been a heavy reader. That said, I do believe that ebook prices are outrageous. I don't think anyone would really argue that they aren't. The publishers need to wake up, lest they find themselves in the same boat that the music industry did when Napster blew up.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
A while back, I wrote a book, Digital Audio Processing (Doug Coulter). Recently, Amazon has it as ebook form, perhaps without even informing my publisher, and certainly without telling me. It would stink without the code I copy-lefted on the CD that came with the paperback anyway. Though they sanitized the book of any way to contact me, my email address is all over that code which they didn't check. I've gotten emails from unique addresses in the ratio of about 20::1 over the sales my publisher claims. They are cheating, no question. Next time I will self publish and sell off my own forum or something, no point feeding those dishonest jerks any more. I now understand why Frank Zappa had such a hard-on about that whole business. They have reported zero e-book sales, but it's up there cheap. Pretty worthless without the nice code though, and I don't see how you get that off an e-book reader and into compilation, so it's a joke all around. At any rate, they make the RIAA look honest....just my $.02 worth, which is more than they've paid me after the advance. My opinion of those guys is unprintable, so I'll quit now.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
BOOKS RULE. Tech pundits drool.
Amazon's used books section contains some incredible deals. You can often find reference works and fiction for $4.00 (1 penny for the book and $3.99 shipping).
You never have to justify your alignment with a paper book.
Haven't had to "justify my alignment" since about 1992, back in the AD&D days.
BTW whoever formatted all those Gutenberg etexts in that annoying tiny bold italic font... FUCK YOU.
Because ebooks are not purchased... they're stolen: http://dilbert.com/2010-09-18/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
I completely agree -- the main thing that's holding me back from buying an e-ink device is a complete lack of decent typography in the software. If ebook readers want to be treated in the same category as real books, they have to look like real books, and that includes the basic typography rules you've mentioned. It's not hard ... I don't understand why even large companies like Amazon haven't invested in this simple, obvious step. The hardware is there now, it's only the software that is completely lacking.
Mind you, I've noticed that print publishers are becoming more and more compromised in terms of their typography too -- ligature marks are rapidly disappearing, meaning that even in print we now get fugly "fi"s half the time. Drives me insane! :(
BZZT!!!
Amazon is no longer setting the prices of books. Amazon would LOVE to drop them BACK to where they were but cannot because the Publishers now set the prices! Look at most any Kindle book on Amazon now and note the "This price was set by the publisher" statement just below the price...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
For me there are two categories of books - "average" books that I like, but not incredibly, that I get as ebooks, and there are those that I really treasure that I get as hard-covers. It must be something about the physical nature of books that ebooks just dont do for me. Admittedly a part of me is also always preparing for the post-apocalyptic scenario where there is no power - you dont see e-books giving you a 2% increase in skills.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Editing, mainly. Most authors need one or more editors, or at least a collection of "beta readers." I own a literary agency, and I have to tell you, of the best authors we handle, there isn't a single one of them that hasn't handed us a manuscript with glaring errors in it. Some authors are terrible with spelling, grammar -- and yet are compelling storytellers.
Ideally for the authors and the readers, this will settle out as a service offered the authors, rather than an artifact of the path to a physical object, but right now, the publishers have a death grip because they control the majority of the market, which is still printed matter. There is little purpose for them (other than editing) to even exist in the realm of e-books; and that's why they're trying to use print to gather in every book's e-rights. The last thing they want is an author out there going right to the e-store and bypassing them entirely - but that's what the economics here clearly indicate is the optimum path.
Next, you do, generally speaking, need a store. If every book were sold from its own website, it'd be very inconvenient for buyers. A store where you can browse many books is better in too many ways to be overcome by individual web sites. So that middleman will continue to exist as well.
Physical book publishers are literally (sorry) in the position of buggy whip manufacturers at the very beginning of the motorcar era. Other than tabletop photo books, their reasons to exist are beginning to go away. Considering how many fine works by new authors they have prevented the public from seeing, while publishing the most awful dreck simply because an author had sold material in the past, I have to say... good.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I went to Borders last night to browse books, even though I own a Nook (woohoo, we should form a club). I found a paper back I was looking for, that was $1 more than the ebook version. I had a small qualm, and bought the paperback. Why? If the book sucks I can trade it in at a used bookstore, but with the ebook I'm stuck with it, and can never even regain a fraction of my costs.
I love my Nook, and I'm really happy with Barnes and Noble (their tech support is among the best I've ever dealt with, had a cracked bezel, they sent out a replacement with a mere five minutes of talking to some nice woman, with no hold time, and let me keep my Nook in the interim. Almost unheard of.), but I can't stand the fact that I don't actually own the books I buy.
That and there is nothing like a real book, sitting on a real shelf.
It also is a bit silly how expensive ebooks are. I find it odds spending more for an intangible thing than for a real, physical, object. Not that I do, if the book is cheaper in a physical copy, I will always buy the physical copy.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Well yea, publishers are certainly struggling with this whole thing and how to pull it off. Part of the problem at the moment is both legal and technical. On the legal side, publishers who have been around for a while have a huge backlog of stuff that they'd like to release. However, no one was thinking of electronic rights even as recently as a decade ago. So every single contract has to be reviewed to determine if the book can be sold electronically. For us that meant manually reading about 10 filing cabinets full of contracts. On the technical side, there's huge confusion about how to produce these things. EPub is emerging as a standard but there's tons of formatting issues and to date we haven't found any silver bullet to turn a PDF or InDesign file into a beautiful looking ePub. You can pay an off-shore conversion house, but you get what you pay for. Publishers have a ton of experience working with printing presses and have developed a process to publish a quality product. None of that in in place yet for e-books. So yes, for sure, there are authors out there who, if they do the right things and get their stuff in order, can do much better. Will Wheaton would be a good example. But you're probably not going to hear a lot from those who tried and failed and trust me ... publishing is awash with failures.
On the price point business, your point is well taken and rational. However, remember that an author who self publishes and fails isn't out much. If it doesn't sell at price A he can bump it down to price B and see what happens since his overhead is ... almost nill. Authors who get a publishing deal tend to demand advances and a fairly large percentage of books never recover that advance in full. That's one of the big reasons you're paying $14.99 for a book that cost 50 cents to print. Failure is expensive for a publisher and the market is extremely fickle. A publisher just hopes that every few years they get a book that sells like crazy to make up for all the others that were dead on arrival.
I did it for all of Harry Potter and then nothing else for years - and yes I owned multiple hard and soft copies of that series. Then earlier this year prices went through the roof and some books were no longer available anymore! I was reading a book+ a week and traveling so like I did with music I turned elsewhere. Music I now get from Amazon for my iPhone, not encumbered and a decent price. When books return to being reasonable I will probably do the same. These guys really are being dumb, thankfully some of the authors are a little brighter. I wish more of them had tip jars....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Here in Belgium, i bought a book for 9€, and i saw it in epub format for 16€, with DRM...
One is cheaper and i can give it to my mother, another is expensive and is limited to one e-reader. Which of them do you choose?
lernu.net
"People are cheap and don't want to spend more for an eBook than the mass market paperback version"
Sounds like you've got shares in an eBook company, my friend!
Perhaps, people are *sensible* and weigh up the cost-benefit analysis and take the best option. "Hey buddy, I've got 2 identical products here, one costs $5 and one costs $15. Which one do you want?". Err.....
Probably people are looking at similar priced products and weighing up which one works best for them. There's a huge number of people once you step out of the computing and shiny-shiny ooh new geek toy communities that are unlikely to be interested in ebooks for a long time if ever. They'll be considering the whole technology package and how it fits into their lives. Most people in developed countries have come across a lot of technology in their daily lives now. They'll compare ebook readers to other technologies and factor that into their purchases of books in whatever format. "So if I want my book in ebook format, I've got to put down a couple of hundred dollars on another device before I can even open the first page of my ten dollar book, and it will probably last only a couple of years then break and I'll have to get another one, I am going to have to think about chargers and batteries, if it breaks will I be able to get all my books off the old one onto the new one in five minutes, can I read it on the beach?" - a lot of factors in there before ebook formats as technical packages get as good as 5 dollar books.
BTW whoever formatted all those Gutenberg etexts in that annoying tiny bold italic font... FUCK YOU.
If you want Gutenberg texts sanely formatted, go to FeedBooks. They typeset them with TeX for your eBook reader's screen size, with configurable text size.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We have also dabbled our toes in ebooks - we have two smart-phones, one dedicated reader, and a library of maybe 50 ebooks (as opposed to a couple thousand paper books). Even at 50 books, I am already frustrated by the quality of the ebook software on all of these devices. Reading is ok - it's the library management that sucks. Even PC-based software like Calibre isn't much good.
Here's an example: Suppose you have a mass of titles by the same author, some are individual books, others belong to various series. You've just finished a book, and want to read the next one in that particular series. With paper books, I will have put the books on the shelf in the right order. Put the finished book back, take the next one to the right. With ebooks? The books are most likely sorted by title. The series information is generally not available. You wind up opening up several books, hoping that they list the series in the right order, or that you can tell from the publication date.
This is just one minor frustration among many. When I imagine having a couple of thousand ebooks in one library - gack, it's really a pretty horrible thought.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.