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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
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 agree with you -- which is why I have a kindle and do most of my pleasure reading on that. Could never read on a smartphone or laptop like so many slashdotters urge people to do here, I look at enough glowing squares at work, don't need to do it at home.
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
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.
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!
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
That is utter nonsense. I own a literary agency, and I know exactly what the numbers are.
First of all, most proof reading and editing is done by the literary agency before the book even reaches the publisher. Also there is work done for free by readers the author collects who act as initial filters. And the agency typically gets 10...20% of what the author gets, which in turn is only a few percent of what the book brings at retail. The publishers and the store make far more per copy than the author does. And reviews are free. Marketing -- if you can get the publisher to do any -- can be expensive. But generally, they expect the author to foot that bill these days. Your own web site, your own "signing tours", your own "buzz generation"... publishers do very little right now. And they're not taking new authors worth a damn, either; if you aren't already published somewhere (short stories, etc.), we can't even get a publisher to look at you these days. And I'd really hate to tell you how many good books you haven't read for just that reason.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
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.
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