E-Books Are Only 6% of Printed Book Sales 437
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's technology blog argues that e-book sales represent 'only six pecent of the total market for new books.' It cites a business analysis which calculates that by mid-July, Amazon had sold 15.6 million hardcover books versus 22 million e-books, but with sales of about 48 million more paperback books. Amazon recently announced they sell 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, but when paperbacks are counted, e-books represent just 29.3% of all Amazon's book sales. And while Amazon holds about 19% of the book market, they currently represent 90% of all e-book sales — suggesting that e-books represent a tiny fraction of all print books sold. 'Many tech pundit wants books to die,' argues MIT's Christopher Mims, citing the head of Microsoft's ClearType team, who says 'I'd be glad to ditch thousands of paper- and hard-backed books from my bookshelves. I'd rather have them all on an iPad.' But while Nicholas Negroponte predicts the death of the book within five years, Mims argues that 'it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of e-books will slow.'"
As a Kindle Owner (Score:5, Informative)
E-Books still aren't there yet. When an E-Book as as convenient, as cheap, and as trouble free as real books, then we'll see e-books take off. But I think they've still got a way to go. Prices need to come down, the devices themselves need to get better (more durable, longer battery life, cheaper) and the software inside them needs to get much better.
Speaking only from owning a Kindle, the limitations on display imposed by are sometimes infuriating: Limited type choices, no ragged right, an orgamizational system which doesn't scale past 100mb of material, let alone the two gigs that comes onboard, (Why people moan that the kindle is not expandable I'll never understand. Aside from a wikipedia dump, who needs two gigs of text on the go!). PDF Support needs vast improvements (why, god why do you let me zoom, but only to the scales you chose for me... which are always way too wide or ten letters too narrow on academic papers?)
Annotations for academic work are important, and on the impotent keyboard they give you on the kindle, good luck. HIghlighting is slightly better, but still painful.
Having ranted though, I have to say, I still love my kindle, if for no other reason than receiving my news paper every morning electronically, combined with Instapaper for long articles.
The devices have amazing possibility, but until they improve, they won't kill the book.
RPG Books (Score:4, Informative)
I am liking the trend (started primarily by Paizo) of role-playing companies that give Print + PDF bundles for their books. I love having access to reference PDFs on my laptop. When regular ebooks start coming bundled with hardcovers or at a more reasonable price, they will definitely take off. As it is, who wants to pay more than a softcover price for a novel?
Re:price (Score:5, Informative)
The very reason ebook prices are so high is because publishers won't let Amazon drop them further, as that would cannibalise their book sales in which they get much larger margins.
This NYTimes article [nytimes.com] broke down prices of ebooks -- showing that a $10 ebook nets them about as much profit as a $26 hardcover [nytimes.com]. It goes on to suggest that they're keeping prices high to slow down adoption -- their whole infrastructure is built around dead-tree books right now, and they fear they won't be able to adapt fast enough to scale down their own DTB-related costs. I suspect though, that when they do figure out how to scale down, they'll be just as happy keeping the prices high.
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
Re:Wrong title (Score:2, Informative)
>The title should be, "Holy crap, an entire 6% of books sold are eBooks."
Yep. I was going to post something to that effect, but you said it all.
Or you could even say "'Sblood! 6% of book sales are lost to eBooks!"
6% sounds about right, but where the equilibrium? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Informative)
Strongly suggest you check out a Kindle - no not an iPad. the Kindle screen is as close to paper as you're going to get in a portable form right now. It's NOT backlit but can be read anywhere the light is good enough to read paper. It doesn't strain the eyes either - it's NOTHING like a computer screen. Give it a chance, you just might find that you liek it. I know being able to carry a few hundred books in my pocket sure is nice. Just be sure to review ebook prices first - right now they suck!
Re:Different Metrics - Price, Units, Profit (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit. You can sell ebooks for less than $3 and make a profit. The overhead is WAY lower. Authors are starting to realize this and publish on their own and it scares the crap out of the publishing industry which is so stupid they actually use the cost of PRINTING paper books as an excuse to inflate ebook pricing!
Read this: http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ [macmillanspeaks.com] completely to see how far up their ass the publishers have placed their heads
and this: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] to see what smart authors are starting to realize!
Re:eBook pricing (Score:3, Informative)
For all the reasons listed from parent on down I do not buy ebooks. I'll download and read from the Gutenberg Project. However, I will not spend money on a book that will, in all likelihood in the future, not be accessible as I'll be damned if I'll buy something twice. I'll not buy at all rather than have to buy twice as DRM history has taught us is very likely.
I like the tactile feel of reading a book and that direct sunlight improves reading conditions rather than destroying them. Plus, I don't like the idea of having to buy another piece of technology just to read. And, I like the ability to share books, buy used books, and give books away if I so choose without having to jump through artificial hoops. As far as I'm concerned, until all those issues are made right I will not buy ebooks.
Re:DRM (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DRM (Score:3, Informative)
Glass.
I have personally broken two Kindle screens. I have managed to get them replaced under warranty - thanks, Amazon. A short fall to a relatively hard surface does it.
Another problem with the Kindle is the screen gradually darkens over time. I believe this apples to all eInk displays and not just the Kindle but also the Sony, Nook and everything else using eInk. It makes the device have a rather limited lifespan that is somewhere around 2-3 years. Much shorter than I originally expected.
Re:Wrong title (Score:3, Informative)
Re:price (Score:3, Informative)
BZZT!!!
Amazon is no longer setting the prices of books. Amazon would LOVE to drop them BACK to where they were but cannot because the Publishers now set the prices! Look at most any Kindle book on Amazon now and note the "This price was set by the publisher" statement just below the price...
Re:6% sounds about right, but where the equilibriu (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why? Because... (Score:1, Informative)
As it happens there are ALREADY folks offering those services to include cover art, editing, the works. It's already begun...
Re:Different Metrics - Price, Units, Profit (Score:3, Informative)
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
from someone doing it.
Re:price (Score:5, Informative)
BTW whoever formatted all those Gutenberg etexts in that annoying tiny bold italic font... FUCK YOU.
If you want Gutenberg texts sanely formatted, go to FeedBooks. They typeset them with TeX for your eBook reader's screen size, with configurable text size.
Re:eBook pricing (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the only reader I know of that isn't (mostly) open is the Kindle. Both the Nook and the Sony Readers take the open .epub formats natively
This is non-sense. When people complain that the kindle doesn't handle EPUB, they mean DRM'ed EPUB. The real problem with the lack of DRM epub on the Kindle are public libraries lending DRM'ed epub, and other shops only selling in DRM'ed epub.
The kindle takes .mobi files, and DRM'ed mobi (.azw I think). The Sony and other readers take several formats but are mostly optimized for unencrypted epub, and DRM'ed epub. The whole deal is about which DRM scheme works on each, and which shop sells on that DRM format.
Back and forth conversion between non-DRM mobi and epub is trivial. All shops I know of selling books without DRM also sell the books in .mobi for the Kindle, and if they didn't epub to mobi is, as I've said, trivial.
Re:eBook pricing (Score:2, Informative)
This is non-sense. When people complain that the kindle doesn't handle EPUB, they mean DRM'ed EPUB.
No, when they complain that kindle doesn't handle EPUB, they mean it supports neither DRM'ed nor non-DRM'ed EPUB.
Kindle only supports:
1) mobipocket (Mobipocket.com was bought by Amazon.com in 2005)
2) AZW - amazon's proprietary format
3) TPZ - actually variation of AZW with embedded fonts
4) PDF & plain text files (yay, these doesn't belong to amazon!)
The fact, that there are converters in the wild, that can convert between formats, doesn't make Kindle "support" mentioned formats.
Re:eBook pricing (Score:3, Informative)
I never said that the Kindle supported EPUB. My point is that for epub without DRM this is a non-issue.
As I said, I don't know of a single e-book vendor selling epub without DRM that doesn't sell a mobi version as well.
The fact, that there are converters in the wild, that can convert between formats, doesn't make Kindle "support" mentioned formats.
Read the post I was responding to. The guy already uses Calibre, so that fact that calibre will convert the (open) epub automatically when tell it to put the e-book in the Kindle is pertinent to him.
If you don't want to use Calibre you can use Amazon's free conversion service by emailing the book to "[username]@free.kindle.com".