Ebooks actually account for a majority of sales
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Have eBooks Peaked?
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· Score: 2
Huh? But the story says ebooks only account for 25% of sales. Yes, but that's the dollar amount. Look at unit sales. The majority of units sold are ebooks; they just happen to be a lot cheaper. We've just reached the point where more than 50% of actual books sold are in the ebook format. MOST books sold in the US are in the ebook format and the Kindle was only introduced six years ago. That's an amazingly quick adaptation. Wool by Hugh Howey for example is only $6 for the ebook five-parter omnibus edition. At Amazon, it's $9 in paperback and $18 in hardcover. You can find examples where ebooks cost more but even from major publishers they're usually equal or less. Self-published authors of course have ebooks for $3 or $2 or free all the time. This also doesn't take into account the literally endless downloads of public domain titles. You can access literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of titles for free. I've downloaded the complete Dickens and the complete Twain for just a dollar or two each. So ebooks already are preferred a majority of the time and we're probably undercounting by how much. This trend will continue and probably accelerate if and when Barnes & Noble goes out of business or just continues taking away floor space from books and giving it to games and stationery and the like. I do prefer a dedicated ereader to even the best tablet. I never thought I'd abandon print but when you're trying to read a doorstop like the recent Winston Churchill bio or Game of Thrones or War and Peace et al, the idea that anyone could argue print is more convenient is absurd.
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Huh? But the story says ebooks only account for 25% of sales. Yes, but that's the dollar amount. Look at unit sales. The majority of units sold are ebooks; they just happen to be a lot cheaper. We've just reached the point where more than 50% of actual books sold are in the ebook format. MOST books sold in the US are in the ebook format and the Kindle was only introduced six years ago. That's an amazingly quick adaptation. Wool by Hugh Howey for example is only $6 for the ebook five-parter omnibus edition. At Amazon, it's $9 in paperback and $18 in hardcover. You can find examples where ebooks cost more but even from major publishers they're usually equal or less. Self-published authors of course have ebooks for $3 or $2 or free all the time. This also doesn't take into account the literally endless downloads of public domain titles. You can access literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of titles for free. I've downloaded the complete Dickens and the complete Twain for just a dollar or two each. So ebooks already are preferred a majority of the time and we're probably undercounting by how much. This trend will continue and probably accelerate if and when Barnes & Noble goes out of business or just continues taking away floor space from books and giving it to games and stationery and the like. I do prefer a dedicated ereader to even the best tablet. I never thought I'd abandon print but when you're trying to read a doorstop like the recent Winston Churchill bio or Game of Thrones or War and Peace et al, the idea that anyone could argue print is more convenient is absurd.