Amazon Sells More Ebooks On Christmas Than Real Books 111
ctmurray writes
"Amazon reports for the first time ever they sold more ebooks on one day than real books. My wife is an ebook-only author and reported her largest single day sales on Christmas day, and December has been her best month ever as well. All those Kindles bought for this season are being seen in ebook sales."
The battle with publishers over pricing seems to be coming to the fore as well.
Re:Greedy publishers (Score:5, Insightful)
First, they have to prove that there is a market.
The eBooks publishing method and the actual recruitment of authors are two separate businesses. In the laster case, they have to build up an infrastructure of editors and associated staff, and even a financing arm (for advances).
They may simply not want to take the risk and capital cost to get into the publishing business, preferring to do "one" thing well: distribution.
public insanity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Joe Sixpack:
Monday: "Hmm... it turns out that buying DRM music was not a good idea. It's caused all sorts of problems for other people. From now on, I'll just buy plain mp3's!!"
Tuesday: "I want to buy some e-books. Hey, maybe DRM will be OK there!!"
Seriously, after the Kindle debacle, why on earth would anyone support that platform?
One day only (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people actually get online to buy regular books on Christmas day? The presents for others have already been bought. They aren't likely to get anything for themselves. Heck, unless you got a Kindle for Christmas you aren't likely to even go to the Amazon website on Christmas day. Most people are spending time with their family and enjoying the presents they DID receive. The people that are more into physical books likely got some physical books from friends or family. But the ones who got a Kindle will find it pretty useless until they put some books on it. Sure the gift giver may have put some books on there to begin with but more likely they gave them some cash or gift card to select their own books with.
!sales (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course none of those sales are really sales - they're just rentals: no lending, no resales, no giving them to a friend or leaving them on a train for strangers (never mind still being capable of being deleted by Amazon as they see fit).
At least they're cheaper than buying a real book though. Oh wait.
Re:Greedy publishers (Score:3, Insightful)
Finding good authors and hooking them up with good editors is not an easy job.
The Kindle and the Amazon web site are the only things Amazon has ever produced. Everything else, they're just a middle man.
Re:One day only (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:One day only (Score:3, Insightful)
I got an Amazon voucher for Christmas, but I can't think of anything I want or need from there.
BTW, maybe the reason kindle books sold so well, is because the regular books were covered by dreck like this.
Amazon.com's Hot Holiday Bestsellers (Nov. 15 through Dec. 19, based on units ordered):
* Books: "Going Rogue" by Sarah Palin; "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown; and "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett
Re:Greedy publishers (Score:3, Insightful)
The Kindle and the Amazon web site are the only things Amazon has ever produced.
And Amazon Web Services. You could almost describe them as a cloud computing company, who run their own e-commerce site as a reference implementation -- if it weren't for their impressive order fulfilment facilities too.
Kindle Prices ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I got an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, because Amazon has no mechanism to gift Kindle books (which is strangely shortsighted, but not the topic on hand...)
I did buy one book with it, but three other books I was going to buy the kindle copies were substantially more than the print copies (in one case, more than double the cost -- $19.97 versus something in the $8 range for a *hardcover*!)
I'm not sure if others have noticed, but lately Kindle books have been trending upwards in price, and its pretty common now that paperback editions are less than the Kindle copies, whereas six months ago they tended to be cheaper, if only by a nickel or something...)
I don't know if prices jumped on Christmas because they expected this, and will come back down, or if these higher prices I noticed on that day will persist into the new year. I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking -- gaming prices is a bad idea when you start getting competition that people actually are talking about.
Price is the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
I got a Sony PR-505 last year and have yet to purchase a single ebook.
The DRM bothers me, but there are enough python scripts running around that will strip it out of the epub/pdf formats that it's not that much of a concern.
Price is why I don't buy them. While there are a handful of public domain books worth reading (opinion) the real content is only for sale.
I just flat-out refuse to pay 50% more for the same content in basically the same format that the publisher already has filed away somewhere. When do you think the last time that a major popular author wrote out a manuscript on a typewriter was? Or longhand? You know it's already in an electronic document format somewhere.
No printing, no binding, no shipping, no stocking, no returns. No fuel, no toxic waste from the paper making process, no toxins from the inks.
Yet I get to pay 50% more?
Re:Where is the catch? (Score:2, Insightful)
My PRS 505 is way thinner than a 500page book.
Re:Greedy publishers (Score:5, Insightful)
"Booksurge allows for smaller runs of books..."
It allows for an unlimited run of ebooks. This is the issue I'm talking about. As more people purchase more books in electronic format as opposed to dead tree, big publishers will become less relevant.
There are still a number of services that a publisher can provide, and my guess would be that Booksurge and the like can or will provide them. So in a way, publishers will still exist, and they will still be a part of distribution but it is now all electronic and the payment structure will shift to reflect that.
In the last link, about the battle with publishers over pricing, it seems apparent to me that the primary leverage the publisher brings to the table is access to the markets, but that ceases to exist with digital media.
This should go without saying in any web forum, but I'm not a published author and I'm not involved in the publishing business. These are just my opinions as an avid reader and someone who spends a lot of time online. That said, I read the vast majority of my books off-line. The ebook readers and their functionality still aren't there for me. The ebooks I do read, I read on my laptop. I've never payed money for an ebook.
Re:Greedy publishers (Score:3, Insightful)
Booksurge is great for very niche products. I've bought some stuff that was published with them, that was great, but far, far from mainstream (Neopagan reconstructionism). One can see where a publisher's resources would help (higher rate of spelling errors), but overall, I think self-publishing like that is great for books with a very specific market.
That said, I agree with you that mainstream publishers aren't going anywhere. They do provide valuable services in terms of proofreading, editing and promotion, even if the actual printing aspect is likely to decline in importance.
I've been buying eBooks for 10 years now. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been looking through my collection of eBooks, all but one non-DRMed Mobipocket or PalmDoc format, and the first ones I got were in January of 2000, right after I bought my first PDA. For me, eBooks were the "killer product" for a PDA.
Near as I can tell the big reason these things haven't taken off are:
1. The format wars. We need an "MP3 of eBooks". Mobipocket format is pretty common, and it's good enough.
2. The price. People aren't going to pay higher-than-paperback prices for an electronic book. They know how cheap electronic distribution is, that needs to be part of the deal.
Re:Greedy publishers (Score:3, Insightful)
you know there are things called book reviews that tend to help decide what books are worth reading. Heck if a book stinks you can stop reading it.
Your car analogy doesn't apply, a hand built car is a one off a book is exactly the same if there are 10 copies or 10,000 copies. It helps that some authors have a reputation so generally you can expect a certain quality. Admittedly some authors are over-rated overwise i'd never have read a book by Geoffrey Archer.
On the plus side more ebooks should make it easier to get hold of a wider selection of books and then we can buy the good ones.
Re:public insanity? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it had more to do with the record labels allowing it. Remember, when iTunes Plus came out, it was basically just EMI artists that were available DRM-free. After EMI didn't go out of business, and the other labels decided to allow Amazon to sell DRM-free tracks (to break Apple's hold on the digital market,) only to realize they didn't go out of business, they finally gave up and let Apple do it too.
The motivator behind DRM in music was the labels, not the distributors. I think that the same thing will eventually happen in e-Books as well -- unfortunately you can't rip a paper book to a digital format nearly as easily as you could rip CDs to MP3s, so if you want to get more than small selection of e-books legally and DRM-free, until then, you're SOL.
Re:Not really surprising. (Score:1, Insightful)
While i agree it should not be more expensive to get the e-book format, your rationale is possibly based on a false assumption; You assume that a books cost is $X because of the cost of shipping paper, printing presses, ink, etc. However, the actual physical costs associated could be pennies on the dollar of the retail cost (just like creating a CD is only pennies), while the lion's share actually goes for publishing percentage, editor fees, and the like.
It still doesn't make sense, unless of course the legalese of the e-book distribution agreements assume piracy and thus mark up the price to cover "unforeseen expenses."
They Don't Have Critical Mass Yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you think is going to happen when Amazon announces that they'd be happy to give any author 25% of all sales if they publish direct through Amazon as opposed to the 5% their publishing house gives them? All the traditional publishers will immediately pull their properties off of Amazon to try to kill their new rival (or at least, try not to keep feeding the hand that is strangling them). So Amazon's Kindle readership has to be big enough that the readership stays with them when a huge amount of back-catalogue suddenly stops being available for purchase, big enough that authors will leave behind editors they have developed working relationships with over decades to have access to.
Amazon isn't there yet.
Re:How many bought both? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems that way, doesn't it... :)
Incidentally, I happen to agree with you that DRM, in general, is awful. But the truth is, for the most part, DRM just isn't a workable technology. So as long as an option exists for me to strip away the DRM on the content I purchase, I'm largely indifferent. That said, until it was clear that the Kindle DRM was thoroughly hacked, I was largely in the "not for me" camp. But now, I'd definitely consider it (once the price comes down a bit on the device), just as I'm happy to purchase DVDs.
Slashvertising bullshit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, they probably sold a few Kindles this Christmas. But my guess is they compare annual low with annual high here. Who the fuck buys paper books on Christmas day?!
- You're guaranteed a long wait for the item to arrive in the post due to holidays.
- You're busy with whatever family-holiday thing you do.
- It's a bit late buying that book as a gift.
- If it's for yourself, you probably bought it already.. when you bought Christmas gifts two week ago.
- You've already got lots of new stuff.