Slashdot Mirror
E-Book Sales Have Tripled In the Last Year
destinyland writes "The Association of American Publishers revealed today that e-book sales have tripled in the last year. Sixteen publishers reported that in February e-book sales totaled more than $90.3 million, a 202.3% increase over e-book sales in February of 2010. Meanwhile, sales of adult hardcover books have dropped 43%, while mass-market paperback sales dropped 41.5% (earning just $46.2 million and $29.3 million, respectively). The book publishing association acknowledged that readers have 'made e-books permanent additions to their lifestyle,' arguing that publishers 'are constantly redefining the timeless concept of "books"' and identifying new audiences they can serve through emerging technologies. 'It's nice to see that book publishers are aware of the changes rocking their industry,' notes one e-book blog, 'and that they're approaching it with a sense of history.'"
Meanwhile, sales of adult hardcover books have dropped 43%
I've heard of adult books with crusty pages, but never one with a hardcover.
Blank until
One still has to buy an ebook even if they own it in paper, pay twice why don't you? In addition, should one want an ebook alone, the cost tends to be comparative to the paper format, or sometimes more, and let us not even mention DRM. I'm waiting for the costs of ebooks to drop to something more reasonable and comparative to the cost of creation/distribution (mostly distribution and production; writing costs will be the same as paper). Admittedly I may be waiting a while, so in that time I'll continue to buy paper books, whilst the whole world of copyleft implodes upon itself and creates a worm hole to L-space.
Wife has a Nook. I have a Kindle. We are each inseparable from these devices, which are each currently filled with easily a two-year backlog of books waiting to be read. If you distribute a book, and there is no electronic version of it available, it's gonna have to be the Word of God newly etched on tablets for either of us to even consider buying it.
I still fail to see why anyone would want to spend money on an e book. I like to be able to read a book ... not worry over when they will revoke the book from "my reader. " It's not even my reader ... because I can't really do anything to it except turn it on and charge the battery without falling outside the law.
With a book I can let someone borrow it, I can gift it, I can sell it .. I can shelf it and reread it 5 years from now. "E books" offer me nothing except worry over when it will expire.
Publishing costs have gone down to approximately nil, while revenues have remained stable and profits have jumped sky high.
Why the fuck should we pay more than a dollar for a file? People paying $20+ for an ebook (the link below shows some close to the price of a modest house) aren't just stupid, they're fucking stupid. There's no reason you should pay that much beyond enriching the greedy publishers and sellers like Amazon - I don't see licensing or odd behind-the-scenes costs (again, see below) as real costs, since it's always about artificial scarcity and silently inflating revenues.
http://askville.amazon.com/100-expensive-books-amazon/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=240635
I bought a Kindle for my wife as a Christmas present a few years back. To be frank, my main purpose was to address the problem we had with ever-growing, increasingly-unstable, easy-to-trip-over piles of books scattered somewhat randomly around our house (she's always been a serious book hound). She wasn't completely sold on the idea, but it only took her a week or so to completely fall in love with the device.
Then this past winter I got one when I found I was going to be "arm less" for six weeks due to shoulder surgery. I also wasn't sold on the device, but have quickly come around. In some ways it's actually more convenient to read than a paper book! And while my initial thought was "Buttons? I dunno, multi-touch is much better" - I now think the navigation buttons are a better way to go. You can easily turn pages on a Kindle using the same hand you're holding the "book", which is not true of an iPad - or even a paper book.
I am bothered by the DRM issue, and initially it held me back from making the move to an e-reader. But since I currently can (and do) strip the DRM from my e-books and copy them to my media backup disk, these concerns don't stop me from using the technology. But I'm hoping someone in authority will eventually step forward with a "Thoughts on DRM" missive regarding e-books - as we've seen with music, selling people DRM-encumbered media has potentially dire long-term consequences; and it's not a given we'll always have the ability (even "underground") to remove it.
#DeleteChrome
It's too bad that, now that publishers realize that ebooks are here to stay, they are trying to take advantage of the situation by keeping prices high and using proprie
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(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
I refuse to buy e-Books until the prices come down to lower than paperbacks (Kindle books usually same price as paperbacks) and I have similar rights per their use as I have with a paper book (which I can sell and lend). And I'm certainly not going to buy them if they are locked to a device or a certain company's devices.
I know slashdot tends to be a little Luddite-ish when it comes to ebooks/ereaders for some reason, but as an avid reader I couldn't be more happy.
When I go to Mexico on vacation, I usually go through a book every day or two. This means I would almost need an entire suitcase for books. With my Kindle, I just bring it! When I still manage to run out of books, the kindle has 3G damn near anywhere on earth for free, and I simply buy more. I have any book I want within seconds pretty much.
They are FAR more comfortable to read with than a real book as they are light and small, and don't have a fat side depending how far into the book you are. Nothing more annoying than starting a book and wanting to lay on your left side to read it. You also never have the problem of dry fingers having trouble getting a grip on the page, or accidentally grabbing 2 pages by accident.
Some people like to show off their book collections, or bring up that dropping a book and an ebook reader off a building only the book is more likely to survive, but for the massive massive convenience benefits, I suggest you store your ego, and take better care of your stuff. I'll worry about not being able to get new books (even though you can put text files on it over USB fine) when Amazon goes out of business.
This way books are cheaper, faster/easier to get, lighter, and easier to read. For me it is a no brainer.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I'm a novelist who has been published by legacy publishers (old style of publishing). As a writer who has moved over to the e-reader market, I've been doing a lot of networking with a lot of writers who are writing specifically for Kindle and Nook markets. What's interesting is that publishers still want to force their tiny royalty schedule onto writers, even though the costs to the publishers have gone to practically nothing. Sure, in the beginning, a publisher puts forth a bit of the upfront costs (including an advance), but what then happens is that the writer receives a tiny fraction of the profit. This was somewhat fine with the legacy model, but now with e-readers, publishers STILL want to keep 90 percent of the profit. One of my publishers sent me an email informing me that because my sales were good, they were going to "reward" me with 20 percent of ebook sales. Yet, when I put books directly onto the Kindle, I received 70 percent of the profit (Amazon keeps 30 percent). Until publishers start moving into the future of this dynamic, the industry is going to make a move much like the music industry did. Right now, publishers are scrambling to maintain control, because the only real positive they have in their favor is that they used to be able to get your books into a bookstore. Now, anyone can get onto the Internet and Amazon. All they have left to offer is marketing, and strangely enough, about ten years ago, unless you were a Stephen King level of writer, they weren't doing any marketing for lower level writers. Which means, the publishing industry is about to implode.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
One of my favorites autors (mostly selfpublishing nowadays) predicts that it will collapse by the end of the year. I guess he is right, e.g. there is this self-publishing guy, who sells a couple of 100,000 ebooks per year for 99 cent. And that other guy, who refused 500 grand and selfpublishes instead. http://www.michaelastackpole.com/?p=2436 http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/09/0618234/Crime-Writer-Makes-a-Killing-With-99-Cent-E-Books http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/22/0125218/Best-Selling-Author-Refuses-500k-Self-Publishes-Instead
I can envision a future with pervasive encrypted permissions in which a glitch or attack will cause us to lose access to a significant part of our writings and media for an indeterminate period of time.
A world without open source books and readers will be like giving us Harkonnen heart-plugs.
E-books read YOU!
One of my publishers sent me an email informing me that because my sales were good, they were going to "reward" me with 20 percent of ebook sales. Yet, when I put books directly onto the Kindle, I received 70 percent of the profit (Amazon keeps 30 percent).
Interesting. Which model brings in greater net returns to you and to the general novelist population, the legacy publishers or the kindle?
It is trivially easy and fast to make your own open, standard .pdf eBook.
It takes only 1 min per 20 pages (or less) to scan a book open face on a scanner. Or use a 8MP+ digital camera on a tripod shooting a well lit open face book, turning the pages as fast as the camera is ready for the next shot.
Use gscan2pdf to do minimal post processing (rotate, crop batch operations) then Save As .pdf.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gscan2pdf/
For most books, this means only 20-30 minutes total, much less than people believe. For most people earning less than $50/hr, the effort is minimal, assuming your PC is doing other things at the same time.
I have talked to several authors, and in every case they make more money eBook publishing.
There are several reasons:
1) Anyone can do it, you don't need to go through the publishing maze in hopes that soemone will allow you to keep a tiny bit of cheese. Remember, Advances are rarely given to unknown names. The First book is written when they are shopping for a publisher.
2) Higher percent of the profit. 60-70% v 10%.
3) The long tail. Once your book is out there, it's out there. No worrying that the book store will stop selling it. As then author gains readers, they will continue to get money from the back log.
4) low cost for new readers. 99 cents mean new readers are likely to give the book a try. That means more reader; wjwhich means more sales from your back catalog.
Cons:
Marketing. a legacy publisher will have a marketing department that is entrenched into outlets. However, they only really use it for a tiny number of author. rarely first time author.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even though the newest price has almost fallen to double digits. I'd be way too tempted to buy more books than I read and spend lots of money. Of course that is Amazon's goal.
Anyone have experience with that model? Seems to look good, but never saw it 'live'...
Also seems to be very hard to get. Even the Sony store here doesn't have it. :-/
> I'll be pirating my ebooks
Try not to. Publishers have *very* slim profit margins, and supporting them lets them buy more works, which tends to increase the number of published books. Also, when you are thinking of Amazon, buy Barnes and Noble if you can--not because they're better, but because it's so important they stay in business. If Amazon becomes the sole major player, they will not only take a bigger slice of the pie than they already are (making it even harder to publish or write books), there will be one private channel controlling the majority of mass-disseminated literature.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I like to browse in bookstores with physical books. I haven't found any kind of e-browsing that competes with it. The only thing that's close to it is to download the entire book and page freely.
To avoid overfilling my house with bookshelves, or putting shelves in front of shelves and making them inaccessible, I've decided to use e-books whenever possible (they still don't work well for art books, for example).
When I decide to buy the book I'm browsing as a paper copy, I'd like to buy and download it on the spot. Even sweeter if the brick-and-mortar bookstore would get a cut of the price so I'm not pushing the place I browse out of business,
-- hendrik
Publishers vary quite a bit in terms of both royalties and freedom they provide to the customer. I'm not sure what O'Reilly pays for the books they publish, but the terms of the digital distribution are really generous. No DRM, multiple formats and sometimes even minor updates to the book.
The main downside with them is a lot of the older books are still PDF. But the ebooks are often cheaper than the print and you can even get the two bundled together if you wish.
As far as novels go, I don't know of any that are that progressive.
Cons:
Marketing. a legacy publisher will have a marketing department that is entrenched into outlets. However, they only really use it for a tiny number of author. rarely first time author.
We all like to pretend that marketing is evil/stupid/useless, but the reality is that it makes a big difference. My brother is a full time author, and once upon a time a book he wrote was victim of the publishers reorg, and he ended up with no marketing effort from the publisher at all. It was in their catalog, but nothing more than that. Compared to everything else he has written, the book completely tanked. Ordinarily the publisher sends out review copies to book reviewers, they schedule readings and signings with booksellers, they arrange displays or promotions in the bookstores, radio interviews, etc. All of those drive interest in a book, and convince the booksellers to order more. Just having 4 or 5 copies on a shelf vs 1 is a huge help - it stick out that much more to people browsing the stacks.
With online selling it gets more complicated, but you still have the question of how to make people aware of your book so that they are willing to make the purchase.
but I am not going to pay nine dollars for a paperback I can buy used for two dollars. Worse, the author passed many years ago and gave the rights to his university. So now the e-book version costs as much as the large format paper back versions, the small ones are seven dollars or such.
Where is the value? Out of the the ten or so e-books I tried to buy only one had price parity with paperbacks, the rest were priced over ten dollars a pop and in all cases I am looking at books over ten years old, many twenty.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Couldn't the author or a good assistant do this a lot cheaper?
Here's the explanation: It takes time for these things to change. Also, most of the cost of the book isn't in the actual copy of the book (in either format).
That, and taking a magazine with you to the toilet. If you're spending that much time on the throne, you either don't have to go, or should see a doctor.
eBooks are definitely still in their infancy and it will be a while before everything sorts itself out.
But I have to wonder what the cost of making a book it. From the energy for the printing press, to the frequent maintenance, and the techs to keep the thing running. Then you have distribution, trucking the stuff around, and then buying back unsold stock, trying to figure out how many books to sent to which store. That would take considerable man hours.
Compare that to a 500kB file that you put up on a web server that a few people edited into the finished product. You can slap it in the cloud so someone else takes care of the servers. There should be oodles of savings.
What other expenses are there in the book business? Execs that are unwilling to give up their koosh jobs having meetings all day?
Publishers chose to train readers to associate high cost initial releases to higher quality binding rather that the release time. If, as they claim, hardcovers cost not much more than paperbacks to manufacture, they've been putting out books in lower quality bindings,why, just to be dicks?
They've made their bed, now it's time to lie in it. Ebooks will be priced based on the quality of the manufacture, not their release date. The difference can come out of their bottom line.
Publishers hate ebooks. They would far rather you buy paperbacks, which is why they're being such dicks about prices and "windowing".
If you want to protest, pirate.
I bought my wife a Kindle for X-mas a couple years ago. She, unlike me, has no issues with DRM. The Kindle fits in really well with a type of book I like to call 'brain candy', fun to read, not deep, no value in re-reading and you sure as hell don't want a copy sitting around your house for the next couple of years.* The whole Twilight series falls firmly in to this category. Read once, discard.
... which is rare.
Then she read a book she knew I'd enjoy, I wanted to read it. That's when it hit me, there is only a single device to read the books on. I'd like to read the book she finished but I can't because she's reading another book. It is the equivalent of having a massive library, but you can't take the books out, and only a single person at a time can enter the library.**
I can see why the publishing companies love electronic books. If I want to read a copy of a book she already owns I have to buy another copy of it, or wait until she isn't using the Kindle
*I'm lazy. Yes I could have a garage sale, yes I could give them to a book bank, yes I could ship them to the third world where they to could enjoy sparkly vampires. Reality is, they just sit around the house taking up space.
** Yes, yes, I could go online and figure out how to hack the Kindle and export all the books and import them on to my laptop to read. I don't want to read on my laptop and if it was a paper book I could just pick it up and read it.
I'm a novelist who has been published by legacy publishers (old style of publishing).
Ah, excellent! Here's a question: what would you consider the production costs to be of your book?
My assumption has always been that it's:
1. 90% the time involved for the writer to write, usually a year for a standard commercial novel
2. 10% for a really good editor to help him pull his thoughts together
That's to get the manuscript ready. Then there's all of the other costs of printing, distributing, and marketing and that's why the writer sees pennies on the dollar for any book that's sold in the store.
I think Amazon's probably taking a little too much in comparison to what they're offering but it's still much better than the publisher's deal. How many dollars in total sales would you need each year for a comfortable income, writing full-time? In legacy publishing it looks like you need to be selling millions and millions of dollars worth of product just to support a modest income.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Can someone please explain the high cost of eBooks?
As with anything else on the market, the price is whatever people will pay for (or will not pay, in which case the seller setting prices eventually goes out of business).
There are LOADS of books available as eBooks in the USA that I can't buy in the UK.
I've tried to give them my money, but they don't seem to want it. Thank heavens for torrents.
Perhaps, but I suspect that in practice it is something where experience makes a big difference. Do you know the contact information of the book reviewer for the local paper in ? Do you even know the local papers in ? Do you know the bookstores that are willing to host readings and signings? Do you have the contacts that know you are bona-fide and not some crank who has written trash that will never sell?
The internet makes answering the first few questions much easier than it was a dozen years ago. But the credibility part is still a factor. The bookstore knows that the publisher has put money into a book with a fairly objective notion that it will make money. Far too many authors have wildly unrealistic expectations about how many people want to buy their book.
If you're a Name, traditional publishing gets you more money faster -- for now. If you're unknown, it's a toss-up (and depends on how well you write and in what genre).
A number of best-selling traditional authors have made news lately by turning down publisher offers (in at least one case, a $500,000 advance) to go indie with ebooks. And one highly successful indie author (Amanda Hocking) just accepted a seven-figure deal from a traditional publisher.
I'm a relatively new author (I'm a SFWA pro based on short story sales, but no novels published yet). The advance I could reasonably expect on a first novel -- which would take a year or two to see print -- I could make in that same two years of e-book sales at 5 copies a day (at $2.99 list).
Mind, it takes a newbie quite a while to build up to 5 a day (and if you only have one title, you might never get there -- the more titles you have up, the easier it is for readers to find you, and the more potential reward for them in investing the time and money to see if they like your writing.)
Of course if you're good and prolific enough to hit JA Konrath or Amanda Hocking territory, you too can sell a thousand or more a day. But it takes years to get there.
-- Alastair
Making dead-tree books and shipping them around aren't all that expensive, and this is the main expense ebooks don't have. Instead of low per-item costs, ebooks have near-zero per-item costs.
The big expense comes in getting the book ready for printing. The publisher has to wade through a lot of submissions, and the rejects are frequently pretty bad. Then there's editing, which is a process of working with the author to improve the book. That's labor-intensive, but improves the quality greatly. Publishers also look for possible legal problems, so the book is unlikely to trigger a lawsuit. (Consider "John, google that for me." That will provoke a response from Google if they notice it, as it hurts their trademark. It isn't a matter of Google being jerks, but rather the fact that under US trademark law they have to take action when they see something like that or risk losing their trademark. The publisher will change it to "John, do a Google search on that for me." or something similar, whatever Google's legal department figures they can safely allow.) Creating an attractive package is more expensive for a dead tree edition than an electronic edition, but that's not going to be a big difference.
AFAICT, publishers price books by taking their rather large fixed costs and amortizing them over the expected amount sold. The only way to make an ebook cheaper is to sell more of them, so the fixed costs can be spread over a larger number of sales.
The problem with increasing sales is that book demand is actually pretty inelastic. At least in developed countries, people tend to buy the books they want and no more, over a rather large range of prices. That's why a paperback might cost $8 today when it would have cost less than a dollar in the early 1970s - inflation hasn't gone up that much, but if you can sell ten thousand copies at three dollars each or eight thousand copies at eight dollars each, which do you think a publisher will pick?
Part of that is because physical shelf space is limited, and so booksellers had no real use for books that would have to be sold cheaper, so there was no point in selling a book at a low cost because that's what it took to drive sales. This became less of an issue in the 1990s, when Amazon became important, since Amazon can stock lots and lots of titles with no regard for shelf space. Shelf space in the home is also a consideration: I'm reluctant to buy a dead-tree book I'm likely not to read because I have to store the thing in my house. This becomes less of a consideration with ebooks: since I got my Nook, I've acquired far more ebooks than I've actually read so far. It costs me about nothing to keep massive numbers of books around on the grounds that I might read them.
Therefore, ebooks have the potential to change fiction publishing dramatically, by making demand more elastic and therefore allowing the possibility of more sales at a lower price. Publishers are approaching this cautiously, because they aren't sure of the demand curve. If they cut the price of the ebooks dramatically, they might make a lot more money, or they might go bankrupt.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes