Wrt. Amazon and ebooks, I don't believe a word they say.
Amazon include free ebooks in their "sales" figures, and have most of Project Gutenberg online for Kindle. (When was the last time you went into a branch of Waterstones and they were giving away free books?)
The actual word I'm getting from my publishers are that sales of real for-money ebooks are up to around 8-9% by sales volume. Revenue lags slightly. But Amazon has 80% of the ebook market and around 10-20% of the physical book market, so of course Amazon has got a disproportionately high level of ebook sales, even before you take into account their desire to push the Kindle (because it cuts their fulfilment cost per purchase to near-zero while retaining the traditional high margin they get by extorting huge discounts off SRP from the publishers).
From the article: "Amazon announced that in the US since the start of the year it had sold 115 e-book downloads for every 100 paperback books, even excluding its downloads of free books."
I'm surprised Amazon only has 20% of the physical book market. I'd have thought it was higher than that, especially now B&N have collapsed.
What can also be found in that article is that, whilst e-books are outselling paperbacks, paperback sales are also up. So, the increase in e-book sales is clearly not at the expense of physical book sales, and pronouncing the death of the physical book seems very premature.
That's Amazon's share of paperback sales. The other link today about market share has some figures on book sales over the last decade, which look pretty static.
With B&N dying it's not surprising that Amazon are growing larger.
I still see no grounds for pronouncing the death of the physical book. That requires figures showing that sales of paperbacks overall have declined significantly.
In terms of book sales, Amazon are rather smaller than everyone seems to think. They punch above their weight in mindshare, but books aren't Amazon's real focus or profit centre -- they make much more money through sales of white goods -- and the real deal is their combined sales database (with third party online suppliers often forced to go through Amazon just because of said customer mind-share) and to a lesser extent their fulfilment system for those items they actually stock.
Interesting. I guess it's because the vast majority of the people I know order the vast majority of the books from Amazon that it seems like they're the centre of the world for books. Easy to mistake that for the way the general public actually uses them. Thanks!
Actually, they were giving away free books in the street outside waterstones the other weekend.
But it was from an author who makes more money than anyone else, so rather an exception.
Amazon, in their advertising, are very much positioning themselves as an everything-you-want store rather than as a bookseller. I vaguely remember ads for amazon as a bookseller, but those days are long gone.
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Amazon include free ebooks in their "sales" figures, and have most of Project Gutenberg online for Kindle. (When was the last time you went into a branch of Waterstones and they were giving away free books?)
The actual word I'm getting from my publishers are that sales of real for-money ebooks are up to around 8-9% by sales volume. Revenue lags slightly. But Amazon has 80% of the ebook market and around 10-20% of the physical book market, so of course Amazon has got a disproportionately high level of ebook sales, even before you take into account their desire to push the Kindle (because it cuts their fulfilment cost per purchase to near-zero while retaining the traditional high margin they get by extorting huge discounts off SRP from the publishers).
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"Amazon announced that in the US since the start of the year it had sold 115 e-book downloads for every 100 paperback books, even excluding its downloads of free books."
I'm surprised Amazon only has 20% of the physical book market. I'd have thought it was higher than that, especially now B&N have collapsed.
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With B&N dying it's not surprising that Amazon are growing larger.
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No, as in 'are included in Amazon's sale statistics for eBooks allegedly'.
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But it was from an author who makes more money than anyone else, so rather an exception.
Amazon, in their advertising, are very much positioning themselves as an everything-you-want store rather than as a bookseller. I vaguely remember ads for amazon as a bookseller, but those days are long gone.