Slashdot Mirror
The Kindle Skews Amazon's 2011 Best-Seller List
destinyland writes "Amazon's released their list of 2011's best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn't even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books. The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren't even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn't make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. 'It couldn't be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,' notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon's best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only 'Singles,' including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he'd released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson's 'Reamde' was Amazon's #99 best-selling print book of 2011, though it didn't even make it onto their list of the 100 best-selling ebooks of the year. 'People who own Kindles are just reading different books than the people who buy printed books,' reports the Kindle site, which adds '2011 may be remembered as the year that hundreds of new voices finally found their audiences.'"
The eBooks on that list ranged from $1-$3 (no shipping of course), whereas the print books ranged from $8-$15 (plus shipping). All other things being equal, of course the eBooks are going to outsell the print ones at those prices.
Hell, the cheaper prices and not having to pay shipping is why a lot of people buy Kindles in the first place. Not to sound like an ad here, but Kindle versions usually run anywhere from $5-$10 cheaper than their print counterparts, you get them right away, and there is no $4 extra for shipping.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Do you really trust a list made by a company that wants everyone to think that the e-version is the way to go. To be fair there should be two lists. One for ebooks and one for hardback. Mixing them together trying to confuse the issue to make it seem like there e-products are better or the way to go is a sham in the sense it that it is bad marketing to not try to sale people on their other products.
If you read the actual article, it reports that it's 60% of the best-selling ebooks that didn't even make it onto Amazon's list of the best-selling print books. (So the two lists only have 40% of their titles in common!)
In case anybody's mystified as to why REAMDE is selling better in print, it's because it's cheaper in hardcover, new, than it is on the Kindle. It's that simple.
Treeware is (obviously) DRM-free. I'm curious as to how sales would like when controlled not just for price but for DRM-free versus DRM-infested.
I know for a fact that I buy or read a lot more stuff from DRM-free places *cough*Baen*cough* than I do from places that insist on DRM.
Sounds like publishers are trying to stifle out E-books with discriminatory pricing.
Why aren't publishers being hauled in front of congress to explain how a few megabyte download is more expensive than a hard bound book?
Would you read different books if you bought a Kindle?
Why should I not trust Amazon? If I were in the book printing business, I'd probably feel the need to thoroughly analyze the claims but let's face it: The best seller lists are pretty useless for us consumers. I'll buy e-books for myself and give hardbacks as presents this year, no matter whether Amazon reports e-book share to be 10% or 50%. I don't need to worry about what impression Amazon is trying to create so I can just enjoy the interesting pieces of statistics.
I'm not saying that the accuracy of statistics doesn't matter (though I might be saying "it doesn't matter much") but I think that in a case like this, we can just discuss the statistics and what they might or might not imply without caring about hidden motivations of the company behind them.
I'm a recent Kindle (Keyboard and Fire) owner. I probably spend US$50 a month on books. Over the years, I've accumulate a collection large enough to make me worry about how much floor loading my attic can stand. So having new books reduced to bits seems attractive. And the Kindle is often just easier to work with since I can adjust the print size to suit my vision comfort. Since I got my Kindle Keyboard (in August), I've downloaded and read about 100 titles. Not all of them were novel-length; I'd say on average the "book" was more like novella-length.
Also, I find myself buying eBooks that I'd probably not buy as pBooks (physical books), partly because they're cheaper and partly because they are impulse buys -- it takes me a few seconds to get a book over the internet and about two hours to drive to the nearest bookstore, buy a book and drive home. I found half a dozen authors I now buy regularly that I probably never would be reading if I'd had time to second-guess the "hmm... that looks interesting" reaction.
Any kindle owner knows not to buy any book that has pictures or drawings. E-ink simply does not work for those.
iPad (or the like, I would guess) are fine fine for pictures and drawings. And being able to use non-DRM ePub format documents is great in color. Don't tell anyone, but the ads in The New Yorker look much nicer on the iPad than they do in the print magazine!
It is profoundly annoying that publishers set nonsense prices. Except in unusual circumstances I simply ignore books with those ripoff publisher-set prices. That publishers refuse to put some (text only) books into Kindle at all really makes me angry at times.
My (finished, in editing and rework stage) Kindle book: http://www.lacunaverse.com/reading/lacuna-demons-of-the-void
While I happen to think it's a good book, the issue with self-publishing is that so much of the material out there is crap. Maybe my book is crap, too; I made the first three chapters and prologue not only available online for free, but also CC-BY-SA-NC, so anyone who reads it can expand them, write their own fanfiction, etc.
But one of the advantages of reading the works of self-published writers is that that you often have a more direct connection to them, since getting noticed is the hardest part of writing a successful novel. If someone gives me feedback on my book, good bad or indifferent, then I'm much more likely to listen.
And... look. Despite what I said about so much of self-published books being crap, well... there is a lot of good stuff out there, too. For example, Harry Potter got rejected by basically every publisher in England before Bloomsbury took it up and then you know what happened from there. So just because something's not listed by a big publisher, it's still possible to be good.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Works fine. Most of the existing readers are using the old generation of display.
Deleted
I don't see much if any savings on the latest NY Times Bestsellers, but I have discovered a lot of authors that I enjoyed at very reasonable prices. Several of the titles on the Kindle bestseller list were ones I had bought - I just finished one by Michael Prescott. At less than $3 many of the books become impulse buys and I will experiment with authors that I had never heard of before, something I would not do as much if the price were higher. Even then if I am unsure, I can always download a sample and see the book interests me before buying it.
I committed myself to producing one short story per week (and I'm thus far on course) until I start my MEng in January. Unfortunately, after a few experimentations with Amazon, I decided that the best course of action was to give my books away until I had enough for a collection of short stories.
(Warning - yet another shameless plug up ahead!)
Here's a short Zombie novella that has many downloads but only two reviews.
So, how does one go about getting fame and fortune (well, enough to live on, at least) just by writing? On Amazon only those established authors tend to get enough purchasers off of their books to continue writing (I, for example, have to stop in January), so where can I, and people like myself, go?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The reason ebook only books sell better is because they are priced in line with the market for ebooks. The market is clear that the correct price for a bunch of bits that make an ebook is up to ~$4. The traditional publishers are trying to use their monopoly to enforce a dead tree price on a bunch of electrons, and they are being outsold by less rigid authors who want to make money, not maintain control.
It's free to you - but not to Amazon.
Amazon's business model would collapse if they had to physical ship $1 dollar books and absorb the shipping. On the other hand, it can work with electronic delivery.
That being said, a lot of the “books” being suggested are actually short stories. It’s a format I love but few people do it because there small so they can’t make money off of them – or is that changing? In any event, I would pay a dollar or two for popcorn books, but if I pay big bucks (over $5) it had better be a big, luxuries meal that will take some time to savory.
Also, did anybody else notice the self published books?
It’s not that Kindle readers are reading different kind of books, but the e-readers allow readers to buy different types of books.
Try a few more >a href="https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lelanthran">impulse buys - the price is $0.00. I try to write mostly science fiction or humour.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Damn - it should be this
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
There's another factor that people seem loathe to explore... the NY Times 'Best Seller' list isn't a measure of sales at the retail counter, it's a measure of wholesale success, and just because a book is marketed wel by publishers to retail chains and libraries well doesn't mean it's going to be successful in the eyes and minds of readers.
Perhaps all we're experiencing is the loss of control over the PR generated reporting on book sales.
Say I go to Amazon and search for "Metal Lathe". Choose a particular item. Then look at "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" to see what other items might be of interest. Amazingly Kindles seem to show up in this list for pretty much any item you look for. Coincidence?
Especially DRM'd e-books with lock-in. Physical books are more expensive since you have to print, ship, maybe ship again. As physical books start going away ("Look at the overhead we're saving on going all e-book!"), and e-books become more popular, why wouldn't expect to see price creep?
(This is in response to the discussions on pricing above, in which I didn't see this point brought up.)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
There's a list of top selling e-books and a list of top selling print books. Is someone surprised that they are different? That's the story here?
I read it twice and it still doesn't make sense. Shittiest summary ever on slashdot, and assuming it comes from the link, which I won't click, a hearty "your blog sucks".
Let me get this straight, book #99 on the print list (Reamde) didn't make it onto the ebook top 100.
Yeah, that's news. Actually, it *barely* made it onto the top 100 printed book list. At least it wasn't DFL (dead last).
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
People with kindles are buying ebooks instead of print books? And buying ebooks that are cheaper then their print counterparts (if any?).
wow, what a weird world we live in.
Be seeing you...
Personally I find it much nicer when people in the audience keep their damned mouths shut..
I wonder if the ebook sales indicate more precisely what people actually want to read, as opposed to what the marketing machine of bookstores convinces them to buy. (You didn't really think that piles of "our recommended books" or even "best-seller" lists were fair and/or merely the things that bookstore employees liked, did you?)
Of course marketing does affect ebook sales as well, but perhaps not as much as the effect of being in a store and seeing a pile of what's clearly the latest hot seller, the book that everybody is talking about, which obviously you should buy. Not to mention that the selection in a physical store is so limited, which thus skews sales toward what is already selling well (whether fairly or not).
"They're saving quite a bit of money by not printing and storing a physical copy of the book in question."
That's not true. It's not even close to true. Printing and shipping are a minor part of the cost of a book. The major cost is editorial and marketing, which are the same for printed and e-book versions. Authors need to be paid. Editors need to be paid. Cover artists need to be paid. Proofreaders need to be paid. Book designers need to be paid. Books rarely sell themselves; marketing is important, regardless of the book's physical form.
You can skip some of these steps and related expenses if you self-publish. Conventional print publishers won't let you make that mistake. It's easy to find e-books that show how big a mistake it is, but the difference is not between print and electronic formats, it's between standard publisher-financed books and self-published books.
What I miss with electronic delivery is time-based pricing. Print disguises this with different physical forms - hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback - but the essence isn't the form, it's that early adopters pay higher prices than those who wait.
but spending money on DRM books doesn't seem worth the convenience (I suppose) that Amazon offers...
So far I've been able to get non-DRM books sufficient to keep me reading for years and most of my writer friends are published without DRM and doing quite well even though the only thing keeping their files from being "shared" is the honor system... If an E-Bbook is not being sold DRM free the printed copy is, as was pointed out before, something I can read then sell, or give away...
The general public doesn't seem to mind that their books can be deleted remotely, that they are paying nearly the full price of a book for a "license" to read the text (subject to the terms and conditions they also haven't read), or that by doing so they are encouraging more of the same...
Unfortunately the education required to make the public aware of this as a problem is a probably beyond the appreciation of the 50% of the population that both test "below average" in intelligence, and learn about what they "want" or "need" from advertising... Especially whatever portion of them see a Kindle or Nook being read by beautiful people in beautiful surroundings and assume that their life would be better for having the product...