From CKGSB Knowledge:
On November 18, 2007, the book business looked more or less the way it had for decades: an industry dominated by a handful of conglomerates that produced a set of products that hadn’t changed much since the 1940s and distributed those products through a familiar set of sales channels.
The next day, Amazon introduced its Kindle e-reader and everything changed. Not all at once, of course – the Seattle company’s first e-reader retailed for $399, and after selling out in 5.5 hours, remained out of stock until April 2008 – but over the next few years, the numbers grew at the same pace with which many digital innovations, from the Internet to social media, have taken off: by 2014, half of all Americans owned either an e-reader or a computer tablet, and 28% had read an e-book in the prior 12 months, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.
All over the world, a similar shift has been underway – slower in markets where bookstores and book sales are regulated, such as France and Germany; faster in more open markets, such as China, where more than 2 million digital book titles are now available and nearly half (44%) of all books sold are sold online, according to a report by German Book Office Beijing.
. . . .
So was publishing’s digital revolution just a successful format change, like the invention of the paperback in the 1940s? Not entirely. Digitalization has also driven a much more profound story about how books are made and sold. From production to distribution, virtually every aspect of the publishing business has changed over the past decade.
To begin with, thanks to e-books and print-on-demand technology, the actual process of printing a book has changed. David Kudler, a small publisher in the San Francisco Bay Area, says that e-books and print-on-demand technology have been transformative. “When I first got into publishing, printing was real simple. You got the book ready about six months before you wanted it to go to press, and you sent it off to China – that’s where the good presses were and that’s where the people who knew how to really put together the book were. And whether you were in Europe or in North America you waited the six months that it took for that book to show up in the stores again.”
The growth of e-books and publishing on demand also helped drive changes in how books are sold. In the US, physical bookstores now represent roughly a quarter of all book sales. Since 2007, US brick-and-mortar bookstore sales have fallen from $17 billion to $11.17 billion in 2015, according to US Census figures. All told, 69% of US books are sold online, according to AuthorEarnings.com.
Link to the rest at CKGSB Knowledge and thanks to Dave for the tip.
I still have my first Kindle, though it wasn’t anywhere near the first model. It did one job very well, and it still does.
Interesting article, but with the wisdom of hindsight, I can’t help thinking it wasn’t the Kindle itself that changed the world of publishing, it was Amazon’s decision to allow ‘anyone’ – i.e. us – to publish to its new device.
I’m pretty sure that decision had more to do with marketing than any desire to start a revolution, yet that is exactly what /we/ ended up doing.
I’d love to know whether Amazon was expecting the response from self-publishers, or whether it was as surprised by the success of it’s marketing gambit as the Big However-Many.
Well…
Thing is, “letting anybody publish” was already a feature of ebooks.
Fictionwise owed a good portion of their buzz among readers to their multiformat Indie ebooks. And mobipocket also suported indies with their Publisher tool.
Nothing about the first Kindle was unique. The simply got everything right and had the clout to take ebooks into the mainstream. Without them ebooks would still be a techie and enthusuast niche, like in France and most of the EU.
I will disagree. Around 1990, I was associated with a startup that built an e-reader. It was way ahead of its time. As a device for reading, it wasn’t bad. About the size of a hardback. Screen resolution was way lower than today, but young eyes could read it with ease. (No one was old then. They invented aging in 2010.)
The problem was getting the books onto the device. We never came up with a real solution and the VCs pulled the plug on us. We had a fair amount of competition and I think they were all about the same: the reading experience was better than passable, but the run-up to actually reading was awkward. Selection was bad, the loading experience was bad. Usually involving shipping floppy disks, loading on a desktop, and then transferring to the device on a serial cable. Yuck. Getting books onto floppies was a big pain back then. Simple photos of the pages took too much floppy real estate. Machine image to text translation was unreliable. We ended up hiring typists to transcribe printed books, which made our ebooks more expensive than deluxe hardbacks.
I think distribution was the secret to Kindle’s success. I didn’t get a Kindle until 2008. I marveled at how effectively Amazon had solved the distribution problem with Whispernet. My wife bought me my first Kindle to take with me to the Mayo Clinic for some drastic resculpting of the interior of my heart. In a waiting room in Rochester wearing a bulky Holter monitor, I was seized with the desire to read the heart sutra and it occurred to me to get it on my Kindle. It worked. At that moment I realized that Amazon had solved the e-reader problem. I had read the sutra several times by the time they called me in for the final pre-op consultation. The heart sutra is very short.
I left that Kindle on an airplane a year or so later and never saw it again.
That’s an interesting tale, but with a sad ending. Good thing Amazon kept making Kindles.
I had the Rocket reader but don’t recall how I got books to load onto it. I do know I bought some books on CDs that were loaded with many titles.
From there, I moved on to the Sony. That involved going online to get the books, then transferring them from my desktop (if I’m recalling correctly). But, yes, Amazon became the champ by coming up with instant gratification via their delivery method(s). Only twice has a Kindle disappointed me: the DX and the Oasis. For me, the Voyage is perfection — though I wish the battery would last longer.
My second Kindle was a Touch. I’ve managed to hold on to it and I still read on it all the time, although I confess that I am addicted to a Microsoft Surface and I do a lot of reading on it also. It is not as easy on these old eyes (invented in 2010) as Kindle eInk, but I like to to read and write on the same device, for which the Surface serves me well. If I had to choose between Kindle, desktop, laptop, Android, or Surface, the Surface would win hands down. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose. I shift between them as the spirit moves me.
Since I don’t fly much now, I’ll probably keep the Touch until Amazon quits supporting it, but the newer Kindles are tempting.
The RocketBook loaded books two ways:
1- direct from the ebookstore (like Kindle) via the built-in modem. Just plug-in the landline phone cable and it would connect. Browse and buy without a PC. Just like Kindle.
2- sideloaded from a PC via a proprietary app. After Fictionwise took them over, they sold an app that let you convert and load ebooks to the reader or to SmartMedia flash cards.
I typically loaded ebook collections to several cards for my mother’s Rocketbook. One card had romance, another Black Mask classics, another Baen SF&F.
The tech was older but the elements were the same as the Kindle.
Never knew that before about the first Kindle selling out in 5.5 hours. I wonder how many were produced. In discussion groups on Amazon.com many owners of that initial version said they loved it so much, they kept on using it long after newer models arrived on the scene. I didn’t get a Kindle till 2009, so I missed that sliding thing on the early ones.
I had one of those very first Kindles. Best present ever! I was completely infatuated with it. Many Kindles later, it’s still sitting on a shelf in my office. I just can’t bring myself to part with it.
Best guess is they ordered 30-50,000.
Even two years later, wannabe competitors were bragging of selling 25,000 in a year.
It was a small market in those days.
Strictly hobbyists and enthusiasts.
Did you see this series here:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2014/10/the-story-thus-far-amazons-storefront/#more-56799
Best numbers I could find.
All told, 69% of US books are sold online, according to AuthorEarnings.com.
Well, obviously Hugh and Data Guy aren’t to be believed. Just ask Big Pub and the NYT! 🙂
Err… no. That’s where the cheapest print runs were available. Plenty of small, local presses could put together a fine book, but they charged significantly more.
Yeah … a living wage.
More to do with economies of scale.
For quite a while it was Canada and not China getting the BPH batch print orders. Didn’t take six months.