Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
Well, personally I'm sticking by my guns, because knowing the blatant dishonesty of Amazon goes a long way towards me taking their so called numbers with a generous helping of salt. Amazon's been caught blatantly lying about sales (and a hundred other things) before, so why should this be any different? I say that they're royally fudging the numbers.
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I assume they're being technically truthful: they are selling ~180 kbooks for every 100 hardcovers. (Or ~140; the numbers changed based on when the reporting was done.)
What they're not saying is how many of those Kindlebooks were under $3. I'm not surprised that cheap ebooks are outselling hardcovers; so do cheap paperbacks. Let's see *dollar* amounts, not units, and then decide whether ebooks are "taking over."
They're including hardcovers for which there is no ebook, and very likely ebooks for which there is no hardcover--including self-published ebooks. The number looks like hype to convince publishers that ebooks are big sellers.
Without more details, the 180/100 ratio number is pure propaganda; it's meaningless without context. What we should know before deciding what that means:
- Dollar value of kbooks vs hardcovers sold,
- Hardcovers vs paperbacks ratio,
- Ebook vs pbook *of same title* ratio,
- Hardcovers vs ebook ration broken down by publisher,
- Hardcover vs ebooks actual unit numbers, not ratio.
We don't necessarily need all of those for the 180/100 thing to be actual information instead of pointless hype, but we need some kind of larger framework before drawing any (reasonable) conclusions.