Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
By the way, Amazon's recently reported unit sales ratios--1.15 ebooks per paperback, 3 ebooks per hardcover--works out to a 45/40/15 sales rate of ebooks/paperbacks/hardcovers.
It's pretty clear that Amazon is already where the music industry is in digital sales and *still* growing ebook share, so setting the bar at 50% unit share is pretty low, even granted that as the industry leader, Amazon is several years ahead of their competition. Because Amazon is clearly pointing out that, given abundant, reasonably-priced ebooks, readers are *not* so wedded to print that the 50% mark is out of reach. More, with the dual examples of Amazon's ebook success and Borders' deathspiral, most retailers will *have* to look to growing their ebook markets to survive. Essentially retailers have to follow Amazon, as B&N is doing, or risk following Borders.
All in all, given the current growth rate, I would expect to see the ratios stabilize at something like 60/30/10 unit sales in the near future. And that is with the price-fix scheme in place. If Agency pricing should vanish, publishers are going to be facing a *lot* of downwards pressure on pbook pricing. Which might explain why they're actively looking for signs of hope even from industries that don't map particularly well to theirs.
|
I think those are crazy numbers.
Amazon has 15% of the US book market and the e-reader with the largest market share; their numbers are *not* generalizable to the entire market.
Although not a perfect match, I think that that the recent history of digital music is instructive, and it suggests that we should be cautions in extrapolating. After 10 years of impressive growth, mp3s still haven't passed CDs in popularity. And digital music has (at least) three important structural advantages over e-books.
1. For all recorded music, you need some sort of player, of the CD, turntable, or walkman variety. Thus buying an mp3 player instead of a portable CD player is not that different from buying a portable CD player to replace a cassette walkman, or buying a walkman to replace a transistor radio.
Books, on the other hand, have not historically required a reader - if you bought the book, that was all you needed. Convincing people that they should pay $100+ just to be able to read books that can be read without a reader is a hard sell for many people.
This would probably change if prices dropped dramatically. But I think that we are several years away from the throwaway e-reader...not the least of which is because the technology isn't mature yet. The best screen so far is the pearl screen...but it's still a few generations away from providing the best reading experience (and I'm just talking about B&W readers). I think we'll need to go through an emerald screen and a ruby screen and maybe even a diamond screen before e-ink screens reach a point where innovations lead to dramatic improvements. And I think that the newer generations will be at the $100+ point until they reach the last phase. And then prices will start dropping.
By contrast, mp3 player tech was basically mature 10 years ago - you could tweak the codec here and there to squeeze out maybe a couple of percentage points better fidelity - but most people couldn't tell the difference. (And by far the best thing that could be done wrt fidelity was to play less compressed music, which was made easier by cheaper hard/flash drives). But it was only after this point was reached that players started to drop dramatically in price.
2. One of the great advantage that mp3 players have is that there is an extremely simple and quick method of putting your existing CDs on your player. Buying an mp3 player doesn't mean that you have to spend thousands of dollars rebuying hundreds of CDs - in a weekend, you can convert your existing music library to mp3 format. There's nothing equivalent for e-books.
3. There is, for most people, a lot more utility in having 3,000 songs with you wherever you are than in having 3,000 books with you at all times. I'm more likely to want to spend 3 minutes listening to "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" *right now* than I am to be hit with an urge to spend 8 hours rereading "Strong Poison." For *some* people, of course, it might be important to have all of their books available...but for most people, I suspect that the convenience is in having 5-6 books available. This is true in my case, in any event. And while I really like the convenience of having these 5-6 books available, it has always been possible, if slightly less convenient, to carry these books with me. It has never been convenient to carry all of my music with me, even though it has been desirable.
E-books have other issues to, such as incompatible DRM and, to a lesser extent, incompatible formats. And while these factors may be more important at some point in the future, right now people seem content to stay within the warm bosom of B&N or Amazon.
So my prediction would be that e-book growth will plateau at 20-30%, and grow much more slowly after that.