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eBooks Nearly Outsell Print Books At Amazon
destinyland writes "Thursday Amazon.com announced that they're selling more ebooks than paperback books — and three times as many ebooks as hardcovers. If you combine their statistics into a pie chart, it shows that 45% of all the books Amazon sells are now ebooks. And Amazon's statistic doesn't include all the free ebooks people are downloading to their Kindles, so if just one user downloads a free ebook for every nine paid ebook purchases — then Amazon is already delivering more digital ebooks than they are print editions."
Another reader tips an interview with Brian Altounian, CEO of ebook marketplace WOWIO, in which he discusses an encroaching feature that ebook aficionados love to hate: ads.
This is same phenomenon that has made millionaires out of many a mobile app writer. Cheaper prices per item can lead to exponentially increased sales, which leads to more market visibility, which leads to more sales, and so on and so forth. This shouldn't surprise anyone, considering the popularity of the Kindle and the costs of physical books.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
if the books are free.
That Amazon does not represent the entire book market - they sell to a subset of customers that don't mind getting their books online. The fact that a significant portion of those customers are equally happy with ebooks isn't exactly a revelation. There are still a lot of people out there who prefer to buy real books, whether or not the big bookstores are catering to them.
As long as the Kindle has the ability to remotely delete books, they can go fuck themself.
Putting ads in ebooks would totally kill my interest in buying ebooks - and I'm a Kindle owner. If they start putting ads in there, I will sell my Kindle on eBay. I suspect inserting ads would kill the nascent ebook market.
It's not like eBooks are a new product - they're just a repackaged offering of a product that's been sold for years and years. I've got lots of paper books, and they don't contain ads... with the exception of occasionally hawking another title by the same author.
#DeleteChrome
Interesting, it seems that nowadays we suddenly first have to put numbers into a pie chart, before we can see what percentage it has. This seems like primary school knowledge to me.
This is a replacement signature.
As I understand it, soon after the ipad was introduced, most book publishers renegotiated their contract with amazon and B&N. The retail chains had acted previously like a normal brick and mortar store and could set their own prices for ebooks, but after the renegotiation they switched to the "agency model" which lets the publisher set the price. Amazon and B&N have no control over ebook prices now, they only receive a certain percentage of the profits.
As a result, prices skyrocketed nearly overnight. The last 4 or 5 books I have been interested in buying have been more expensive as ebooks than in hardover or paperback form. So yes, it is a complete ripoff. Especially since you don't really own the ebooks you purchase and cannot lend them easily or sell them.
However, I don't want to lose my library when the reader breaks or the publisher flips the kill switch. I will keep my hardcopies until ebooks are sold in, say, an unobfuscated XML format. (In fact, ebooks might finally provide a justifiable reason for XML to exist!)
A good reason to strip the DRM off your ebooks - as is recalling what happened to the music libraries of people when their preferred vendor (e.g. Walmart) decided to exit the digital music business.
When I purchase a Kindle book, the first thing I do is strip the DRM off, then copy the file over to the same hard drive my ripped (purchased!) DVDs are on. That drive gets backed up regularly, so I figure I'm covered. The only downside is certain formats - like the "Topaz" format Amazon uses for a minority of books - don't seem to be transparently "strippable".
#DeleteChrome
Well the argument is (I don't totally believe it myself) that the actual printing and distribution of paper books is so cheap these days that it makes up only a small percentage of the costs.
The cost of editing, ebook creation, and Author's Royalties account for the price of an Ebook. The difference in price between a hard cover (or paperback) and an ebook is the printing and distributional costs.
Take any popular book such as Steven Kings "Under the Dome" and compare prices. Ebook 10, Paperback 12, Hardcover 20).
If you wait a year or more the price diverges even more in favor of the ebook. Sometimes the prices are upside down, with ebooks being higher than print. Usually this does not last beyond 9 months after release.
Now what you pay for a second hand book is entirely another matter. The author gets none of that money, and neither does the publisher. You have arguably arrived at the social value of the underlying literary work as all profit has been paid previously and stripped off.
The reason one buys older books in ebook format is for convenience, and not having to line ones walls with shelves against the day you may want to re-read the work, or to avoid having to carry around a mountain of paperbacks.
For those who want to read once, and not retain anything, used paperbacks are the way to go. For those who think an author's work is worth paying for, paperbacks or ebooks make the most sense. For collectors: hard covers.
But in no case can you make the claim that an ebook has zero manufacturing costs.
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Every single thing you said is false in the digital world.
Its not a common place for people to learn. Library patronage is falling fast.
Its no longer needed for a literate society. We have thousands of book stores, the Internet, and millions of totally free ebooks.
Finding new authors? ---> Google.
Enhances sales? Suppresses sales you mean.
And libraries deprive authors of thousands of royalties.
So wrong on 100% of your points. A case can be made that libraries in the digital age serve precisely one purpose, and that is to assure continued availability of works unpopular with the State or the Church or the general times.
Its an unpopular view, but never the less, libraries have largely outlived their general usefulness.
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Am i the only one who finds ebooks to be a complete ripoff? I received a kindle for christmas and was completely floored by the fact that most amazon ebooks are $10+! I can go to a half price books and get the book in paperback and sometimes hard back for the same cost or less in most cases. The fact that I'm expected to pay the same for a product with zero manufacuturing costs as a physical "it's mine" copy is outlandish.
Can you carry 1000 books in your pocket?
You're paying for other things when you buy a Kindle book - mostly, convenience. You can carry many books at once and access them from anywhere, even without the Kindle device present (they have a PC/Android/iOS app that syncs your library and last read page).
If the Kindle were cheaper, I may even be willing to pay *extra* for books. I've got several books I'm reading right now and I hate having them all over the place.
You also get books instantly. You can get books from a bookstore pretty much instantly too (depending on your proximity to a book store), but they cost more at a bookstore - because you're paying for convenience.
I recently paid almost 3 times the "shipped from online" Barnes and Noble price for a book to buy at a B&N store because I wanted to start reading it that night.
Its interesting actually:
The book (ReWork - though I don't exactly recommend it, turns out) is:
(all prices from B&N since they have a brick and mortar and online store)
$7.47 Paperback online (on sale from $9.00)
$9.02 Nook edition
$12.91 Hardcover online
$21 (approx, from memory) in store hardcover price
I paid $21 for the book because I wanted it that night. Compared to the digital version, I spent an extra $12, or 8.5% of a kindle (I'd rather have a Kindle than a Nook)
I'd miss the smell of a good book, that's for sure, but otherwise, as long as it can't be DRM'ed out of existence, I wouldn't mind paying the same or even more for a Kindle version.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Amazon is quick to talk up exactly how many ebooks it has sold, but the company won't disclose how many Kindles it has sold (it just says 'millions'). Ryan Faas thinks that 'one reason that Amazon may be enjoying this level of success and yet be unwilling to disclose how many actual devices it has sold is that many of those ebook sales may not be tied to actual Kindle devices.' By making the Kindle a platform that can be run on just about anything, Amazon has positioned itself to rake in ebook sales even if it can't move Kindle hardware in vast quantities, says Faas.
Is this real?
A manipulation from Amazon would be nothing new, and this one costs them nothing and has the potential to create a profitable trend. Those Jonses and their Kindles.
But whatever. Let's take it at face value. . .
All those people who got an iPad thingy for Christmas are eager to try it out and never ever get bored with their cool new Buzz Lightyear.
So yeah, they're going to buy media, because that's the whole premise of the device. You don't get a Buzz Lightyear and *not* click his wings open a bunch of times.
And the same way everybody had to replace their album collections with CDs, there is a market spike as new media is adopted.
The question is. . . Will it stick, or is this just another digital watch?
Well, let's consider. . , all those iPads were bought at around the same time. But their batteries will wear out according to usage, and when your digital book stops holding a charge for long enough. . , do you replace it? Was the experience good enough for you? Can you port all your purchased 'books' over to a new reader easily? Do you have to stay brand-loyal just to read your stuff? Will there be law-suits forcing personal library porting because Apple is the new anti-competitive demon? Will people even care? (Do you still have all the same crap you downloaded from Napster or have you moved on, secure in the knowledge that all that old music is basically free any time you want it? Or are you willing to pay a buck to play it on your iPod?)
Will owning an eReader of some sort be like owning a car? Or a phone? Considered a basic necessity just so you can access your stuff?
Maybe.
I think eReaders are probably here to stay, and they will probably be a viable income source for publishers, but I wouldn't let all that limelight blind you. Paper ain't going away. It's just going to have to share.
Remember: Theater never died. There's a half dozen full stages within a ten minute walk from my place, and they're all booked regularly.
-FL
You are licensing the eBook. Not buying it.
Amazon recalls (and embodies) Orwell's '1984'
Welcome to America.
You will find it different here than the jungle hut you used to live in. Here people do things for money. Since you work for free, you might not notice this. But don't tell Charles Portis he is ripping you off by selling you a book. (Yes, he's still alive and collecting royalties).
One might ask why there was even a remake of True Grit. Must be just a clear rip off.
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Welcome to capitalism.
Buy things you think are worth the price, don't buy things you don't. The market will respond.
As for me, I agree with you 100% and I've been a Kindle owner for years now. This has lead me down the path of trying new Authors who are trying to build a name for themselves. They do it by offering lower priced books, or even giving away the first book in a series.
It's been great!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Also, let's correct this quote in the summary: "they're selling more ebook licenses than paperback books". Give me a real book I can lend/sell/give away.
So, how does this argument not apply to paper books? In fact, it's actually a better argument for paper books, because most libraries have long practice in being very convenient to borrow paper books from, whereas most eBook lending programs aren't very convenient at all; usually they're so rights-encumbered that they give up most of the advantages of being digital copies.
I'm a grad student for Library and Information Science, in my last semester. While it's great when people contribute to libraries, it's not a tragedy when they buy books for themselves.
Actually, nothing he said is false, and also, library patronage is seeing a rise lately. FUNDING is falling, true; but libraries serve a variety of social functions, serve as the main driver for many literacy programs, facilitate research in any number of areas, and, oh yeah, generate royalties through book purchasing.
And the "libraries hurt authors" chestnut has been stupid since roughly the 1800s. If you can't bother to do enough reading to debunk that crap, I can't be bothered to hold your hand through it.
Additionally, the impact of libraries is larger on certain populations - namely, those who can't afford books and other services offered by libraries (including the kind of open access to the internet required for participation in your "digital world").
Those millions of free eBooks - where do you think a lot of them came from? Magic fairies? A huge percentage of the people involved in Gutenberg work at libraries. Hell, half their mirrors are on various library-owned servers. You know where the books Google scans come from? Largely libraries. Oh, shit, and you know where the metadata that lets you find those books comes from? The OCLC - the L in which stands for, you guessed it, Libraries. I just interviewed for an internship there - they're looking for librarians with traditional cataloguing skills.
I'm just curious why no one has mentioned e-calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) as a great tool for essentially removing the DRM from Amazon books. Just suck your .amz or .mobi books off your Kindle and convert them to .epub and back. A buddy and me have permenantly "loaned" each other copies of several books we bought off Amazon in this manner.
PS . . . What the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated --- Mitch Hedberg