05-16-2009, 08:37 AM | #211 | ||||
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If you want the sales figures to be more realistic, to have any meaning, you should also qualify that by also presenting the values only on recently published books... say, within the last few years. Doing so for books that have been published since the introduction of the Kindle would actually be the best idea - it would strip away most of the freebie and public domain texts and also show how the new format fares with its dramatic discounts versus the hardcover paper version. Quote:
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Allowing for your limit to 50% error, then you can claim that Sony would be tied or beating Amazon by a slim margin. This despite the fact that Amazon has been hyping the thing ad-nauseum and Sony, well... hasn't. (Assuming, of course, that the Sony numbers are any firmer than the Amazon 'numbers'.) Oh, please... let's not go there. When someone flatly refuses to tell you what numbers he's using to base his claims of owning the market, I tend to be doubtful when he breaks a two-year news blackout. "The Kindle is a hit!" Why? Because Amazon says so! That's pretty much what most arguments on the subject boil down to. |
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05-16-2009, 08:57 AM | #212 | ||
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I could actually buy that figure if they qualify it within the bounds of Kindle account holders. The problem with admitting that (if only Kindle accounts was the actual case) would be that you could then twist the figure into saying: "Look, even with Kindle versions available, Kindle owners still prefer paper two-to-one!" Thanks for the reply. Your remarks on the 'puffery-factor' are quite true. Of course they'll skew the numbers in the most favorable light to prove their wonderfulness. I just like to have enough detail to know what is puffery and what is a valid claim. The Amazon claims are woefully lacking in detail. This brings to mind the original Kindle debut. They sold out their initial lot in a week or so. Then they use that as proof of the high demand for the reader. If their first lot was ten or twenty thousand units, that would have impressed the heck out of me. I don't think Nuvomedia sold ten thousand Rocket eBooks (I still use mine on a daily basis and my serial number is something like 7300) over the life of the unit. If their initial lot was 500 or a thousand units, that would thoroughly underwhelm me, since there are easily enough gadget-geek first-buyers out there to exhaust that-sized lot. Then amazon can do what it did: claim the quick sellout shows huge pent up demand for their reader. As with all-things-Kindle, we have nothing to base an argument on. |
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05-16-2009, 09:01 AM | #213 | |
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05-16-2009, 11:01 AM | #214 | |
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Avoiding that was one of the reasons I suggested looking at the numbers with new releases. Even with the unfair advantage of having a 60%+ discount on a new hardback, it would be more indicative of on-going sales, not a python-lump of backlist sales as the initial wave of Kindle II users get their hands on their readers. |
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05-16-2009, 11:36 AM | #215 |
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The only thing more I can offer is, as someone who has worked with companies to try to get numbers out of them before, is that some companies really are reluctant to provide numbers that would put them in a positive light. Some of them value secrecy. Amazon in particular has been notoriously private historically about its internal business metrics.
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05-17-2009, 01:04 AM | #216 | |
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05-17-2009, 01:27 AM | #217 |
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Yes, but I'm a big believer that transparency is better for the industry as a whole than secrecy. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma sort-of thing... if everyone plays openly, everyone benefits, but if one company doesn't, it ruins the game for everyone, particularly if they're a large company.
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05-17-2009, 09:42 PM | #218 |
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Dahak,
Actually, I found a link the first ten minutes of the video of the announcement, so you can hear the exact quote yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPRJArsQjxk "Where we have Kindle editions, Kindle sales are now 35% of books." According to the chart it went from 13% in February to 35% in May with the launch of the Kindle 2. During the Kindle 1 period it was in the 5% - 10% range. |
05-17-2009, 10:57 PM | #219 | |
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Thanks for that. Good quote. Completely unqualified. And I don't for a minute believe it. I feel certain that if we twisted Bezos' arm, we'd learn that it was a rather finely-tuned stat. Like I said in another post, I have no particular qualm with that, he's a salesman, after all. I just want enough information to know where the facts end and the spin begins. Strip out all of the freebies and PD-near-free and the not-unreasonable python-lump of backlist sales, then the number of newly released books - which I feel is a more realistic ongoing figure - would have a much lower percentage. The first graphic he showed with the numbers of Kindle Editions in the store is a wonderful example of lying with statistics: the time scale across the graph is not linear. To greatly improve the 'acceleration' in edition numbers, the initial point (Nov 07) is much closer to the introduction of the Kindle II (Feb 09) than it should be. If you take the two right-hand data points and say that the difference between the two is a three month gap, then the Nov 07 data point, properly scaled, should be somewhere off the left edge of the screen. -Joe |
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05-17-2009, 11:21 PM | #220 |
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It wasn't meant to be time-linear. Anyone can grab the numbers and do such a chart to see what it looks like; I did this for the thread on the Kindle forum tracking the number of books on Kindle and the trend is indeed accelerating.
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05-18-2009, 12:20 AM | #221 | |
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And... not to put too fine a point on it: I don't believe you can prove an acceleration of numbers based on three data points. Clearly, the numbers are increasing, but you have nothing to check the rate of increase on that slide. You have a figure for month 1, months 15 and month 18. If the rate of increase was constant over the entire first 15 months, you'd be looking at about 9300 titles/month. But that's assuming a constant increase over the entire period. It's much more likely that the pace has increased in discrete steps as more staff is assigned to conversion duty. The last three months, Bezos implies a rate of 15000 titles/month. Unfortunately, without more data points, we have no idea how that pace changed during the rather large first time frame. I ran across an interesting bit here where he's been recording the Kindle Store's own numbers daily for the last two months and the rate of increase has been virtually constant over that time. -Joe |
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05-18-2009, 11:48 AM | #222 |
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Again, as I said, we have tracked the numbers provided by Amazon on their website since release in this thread. The numbers are indeed accelerating; here's the chart.
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05-18-2009, 11:52 AM | #223 |
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One disturbing trend I've noticed (esp. in Sci Fi titles) is the publication of short stories - are these padding the numbers and being counted as "books"?
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05-18-2009, 12:00 PM | #224 | |
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I agree it's an imperfect measure, but the fact remains it's accelerating. It is unlikely that "real" books are growing steadily but the "books we shouldn't count" are accelerating at twice that rate. And then who decides what books should be counted and what books should not? |
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05-18-2009, 07:12 PM | #225 | |
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But there seems to be a bit of a discontinuity in the summer of '08. It's been a while since I've played with numbers like this, but I believe that if you fit the curve from the start to about June or the beginning of July '08 and do a separate curve fit for Sept '08 onward, both curves would a be quite a bit more linear. Yes, there is some acceleration, but that extrapolated end-point would be lower if you start the curve-fit in Sept '08, instead of Nov '07. Thanks again for the numbers. -Joe |
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