From GoodEreader:
It’s been 12 years since the Kindle first appeared on the scene, and within a couple of years, it became clear that e-readers were no passing fad. In fact, the experts of the day confidently told us that in the dim and distant future of 2020, print books would be largely relegated to the role of decorative shelf fillers, and we would all have a personal pocket electronic library.
That’s not quite the way it turned out. In fact, ebooks constitute around 20 percent of book sales, with the rest being traditional print volumes. A decade ago, we’d have expected those numbers to be the other way around by now. So what happened? It all comes down to two factors, consumer habits and money.
. . . .
Generation Z represents the 20-somethings who have never known a world without the internet and social media. You’d expect them to be the ones to lap up ebooks, but that’s simply not proved to be the case.
Here’s the thing. The average gen-z-er spends hours of every day in front of a screen, and not just for Snapchat and Facebook. Even when it comes to, for example, playing card games, usually seen as a traditional way to pass the time with physical cards at hand, or even watching TV, the smartphone screen is becoming the platform of choice. Yet when younger readers want to read a book, they prefer to put the tech aside and do so the old-fashioned way.
Incredibly, the main users of e-readers are their parents and even grandparents. Baby boomers, in particular, fell hard for e-readers. They negate the need to go out to a bookstore, and the whole question of print size becomes an irrelevance, as they can zoom the page as much as they wish.
. . . .
But as e-readers gained popularity, the major publishers became increasingly uncomfortable. They felt that this $9.99 price tag was devaluing books. Worse, many understood that Amazon was probably selling at a loss in order to corner the market. Would this mean that a couple of years down the line, they would start putting the squeeze on their suppliers?
This was when Apple joined the fray. A competitive market had to be a good thing, and Apple was determined that $14.99 should be the minimum cost. Where things got tricky was when they signed up the six major publishers to their price plan, essentially forcing Amazon to either play ball or have no ebooks to sell.
This resulted in years of antitrust lawsuits and over $150 million in sanctions against the publishers. But the standard was set. ebook prices are now dictated by “industry convention” and Amazon is forced to adhere to them.
The result? While the ecommerce giant can discount print books as much as it likes, it has no such flexibility over the ebooks. It’s a situation that still seems imperfect, and is certain to be revisited over the coming year or so. In the meantime, ebooks are not going to disappear. But it seems the age of print is far from over, too.
Link to the rest at GoodEreader
PG is a bit skeptical.
“ebooks constitute around 20 percent of book sales, with the rest being traditional print volumes”
PG hasn’t seen this particular stat anywhere and the OP doesn’t cite any authority for it.
Plus, there’s the question of what “book sales” means. Is it units sold or dollars? Is it traditional publishers (who overprice ebooks) or has the author of the OP gotten information about Amazon’s ebook/print book sales info which includes indies. (PG doubts that)
Or does the author of the OP not know about indie authors? Or buy the New York attitude of “Pay no attention to the rabble”?
PG included the portion of the OP that discussed the Apple/Big Publishing antitrust case because the author of the OP got that wrong as well. Nothing in the antitrust litigation required Amazon to price tradpub ebooks at the price set by publishers. Amazon wasn’t a party to the antitrust litigation because it hadn’t done anything wrong.
Amazon pricing BigPub ebooks at prices that are too high was a wonderful gift to those indie authors who participate in KDP. They get the best of both worlds – the authors make more money selling ebooks and they can still substantially underprice ebooks from tradpub so readers get a good deal, too.
At this point in The Lockdown Era, it seems pretty clear that (unfortunately) a whole lot of retail stores, including physical bookstores, are not going to reopen when lockdowns end.
It’s not just that the landlords of the bookstores are going to terminate their leases. It’s also that the bankers that hold the mortgages that the landlords aren’t able to make payments on are going to foreclose and find new tenants. Or the real estate investors that own the shopping center or strip mall where the bookstore is located will be interested in tenants that aren’t likely to file for Chapter 11 (or 7) bankruptcy relief.
But PG could be wrong.
The biggest problem with saying anything about “the” publishing industry is that there are thirteen of them. And they are all distinct, despite the conglomerates; reviewing the history of ITT in the 1960s, or Gulf + Western up through the 1980s, or even just pondering the sheer range of Disney’s activities today, is highly instructive.
The real problem is that at least 60% of the industry is completely invisible to B&N or any other consumer-oriented bookstore. They might be able to special order some of the biggest-selling, most-profitable books… but they won’t stock them, not even in the warehouse. Basal readers; Patry on Copyright; The CRC Handbook of Tables for Probability and Statistics (2d ed.); the laboratory manual to “accompany” Morrison’s Organic Chemistry (hack phhhhhht); coursepacks at Georgia State University (how’s the litigation going, by the way?); and on and on and on.
It’s not that there’s no e-book transformation of or penetration into these categories. It’s that e-book effects are different at a fundamental level, unaffected by “the bookstores.” Trade publishing is the magician’s assistant: It’s flashy, it’s got sequins and a big smile — and it’s distracting everyone from the prestidigitation. (And it’s somewhere between 20 and 25% of publishing.)
So I reject the premise of the entire article. If it would limit itself to trade, or trade fiction, it might have something to say (if the data it’s relying upon is both replicable and accurate); beyond that, nada.
In those case where the writer actually knows something about the subject, “sales” mean pretty much whatever they want to use to push their point of view. Of course, most journalists actually have no idea what the word means when they are writing it, but they do like the implications they can draw from the percentage they quote.
We will never get the figures but I’d like to replace “sales” by author income, just because the latter is much more important to professional authors than the ego stroking and bragging right that come from large unit sales (which could come on deep discounted hardbacks paying no royalties). Human nature being what it is we’d still have people bragging, but this time about income rather than books sold.
The 20% statistic is probably held over from some articles about the big 5, but we really don’t know anything. Amazon does not talk about how much they sell either of pbooks or ebooks, and this is most likely because no matter what they say they would be throwing more logs on “ethical consumption” bonfire they find burning at their feet. The externally collected statistics I’ve seen are something like 45% of all pbooks, and 85% of all ebooks. Considering that Amazon regularly says they sell more ebooks than pbooks, then it’s easy to see that the size of the ebook market must be at least the size of their share of the pbook market, which by those statistics is nearly half of the entire pbook market. So, 50% minimum?
But we don’t know. Amazon has decided that publishers are not their friends (gee, I wonder why…) and is keeping their collective corporate mouths shut about all of this.
PG: “…Plus, there’s the question of what “book sales” means. Is it units sold or dollars?…”
And to go further down this track: what about “page reads”? Plenty of Indies have a big chunk of their royalty revenue coming from these reads. No books are sold at all, yet the money keeps showing up. Now that is revolutionary.
Good point, H.
I’ve never seen any estimates of how much Amazon pays out each month for page reads.
The Digital Reader blog reports on the total monthly payout and the per page rate every month:
https://the-digital-reader.com/2020/11/14/kindle-unlimited-funding-pool-rose-by-300k-in-october-2020/
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The KU funding pool grew to $32.9 million last month, while the per-page rate fell by about half a hundred of a cent.
October 2020: $0.004538
September 2020: $0.004594
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He also keeps a running tally back to day 1.
The current rate annualizes to just under $400M a year.
Assuming different values for how the monthly pool comparrs to subscription revenue (30%,50%,70%) could be used to calculate the number of subscribers.
Could be anywhere between 5-11M.
Since Amazon said a while back that the average subscriber reads the equivalent of six full books a month, KU might be substituting for something between 360M and 750M books.
There’s whole lotta reading going on in KU. And since KU attracts the most avid of readers its impact on bandwagons is massive.
(Other WAGs are possible, working off average full book-equivalent payout but this one is simplest.)
When ADSers complain about Amazon’s power and discounting of pbooks, they are literally barking up the wrong tree.