Have eBooks Peaked?

An anonymous reader writes "At Rough Type, Nicholas Carr examines the surprisingly sharp drop in the growth rate for e-book sales. In the U.S., the biggest e-book market, annual sales growth dropped to just 5% in the first quarter of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, while the worldwide e-book market actually shrank slightly, according to Nielsen. E-books now account for about 25% of total U.S. book sales — still a long way from the dominance most people expected. Carr speculates about various reasons e-books may be losing steam. He wonders in particular about 'the possible link between the decline in dedicated e-readers (as multitasking tablets take over) and the softening of e-book sales. Are tablets less conducive to book buying and reading than e-readers were?' He suggests that the e-book may end up playing a role more like the audiobook — a complement to printed books rather than a replacement."

Comments

Re:Disappearance of E-Ink

[Wordplay]

Even the new Kindle Paperwhite is meant to be used with a backlight, increasing the likelihood of headaches and eyestrain.

Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where people just aren't informed enough

...for example, they think that the Kindle Paperwhite is backlit.

It's sidelit. That means the light comes from the front, diffused across the screen via a fiber optic mesh, reflects on the screen, and then back at you.

It doesn't have any of the problems that backlit devices do, and is extremely similar to reading with a booklight--except for the not having to carry a booklight part.

Nook Glow is the same basic tech.

Re:Disappearance of E-Ink

[msauve]

As for the Kindle Paperwhite.... there is zero difference between reflected light (off a page), because the Paperwhite is not backlit. There's a diffuser sheet on top of the screen, and the built-in light reflects off the e-ink display the same as room light does.

Re:More buck for the bang?

[jkonrath]

From http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html (Slightly old)...
Based on a list price of $27.95
- $3.55 - Pre-preduction - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
- $2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
- $2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
- $2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
- $4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Subtract the author's agent fees and self-employment taxes from that, too.
- $12.58 - profit for the retailer.

In the case of an ebook, you're removing the $2.83 in printing.

You might be removing some of the wholesaling cost, but you might be using Ingram to do your wholesaling if you're a big company. If you're self-publishing, you might be using something like BookBaby or Smashwords. Yes, you can go to KDP and register your own book yourself, but if you're selling in multiple places or selling multiple books, you're going to use a middle-man to handle cataloging, recordkeeping, and listing things in multiple places. If it's more than $2.80 in headaches, you use a distributor.

Marketing, pre-production, royalties all don't change. (Or they get squeezed, and you get exactly what's going on right now, which is authors complaining "they don't pay us or market us or do a good job editing us like the good old days.")

As for that $12.58 of supposed profit, here's the interesting thing - Amazon doesn't sell books at list price. John Grisham's new book, The Racketeer, is an example. List price: $28.95. Yours for only $19.81 in paper.

I'm not saying that ebook prices should be equal to the price of a printed book, but removing the printing doesn't suddenly make a book cost a dollar or even five dollars.

Re:Piracy!

[dgatwood]

Right. At least for the small values of forever in which Kovid Goyal and contributors remain interested in the Calibre project enough to keep it going, after which you have to maintain the code yourself if you want it to keep working.

You don't need Calibre to convert it every time you read it. You do it once. Therefore, even if Calibre stops working in the future, that doesn't prevent you from using the books that you've already converted. Hence, "forever".

And the small values of forever in which ePub is a supported format on the devices available to you when your old ones stop working.

Ignoring a handful of special metadata files in their own quirky XML format, (DRM-free) EPUB is nothing more than a zipped folder full of HTML files and PNG/GIF/JPG images (and, occasionally, SVG). Given that HTML is now 23 years old and is still rapidly growing in popularity, and that ZIP is even slightly older, and that both are absolutely ubiquitous as technologies go, barring a technology-destroying nuclear holocaust or some similar catastrophe setting us all back to the stone age, I think it's safe to say that with minimal effort, you'll be able to continue reading EPUB books for at least the remainder of your lifetime, and probably for the remainder your grandchildren's lifetimes.