Quote:
Originally Posted by Kingston
Don't quite know how he arrived at his numbers but this
fellow estimates it at 4-5000/day. Pretty impressive given that there
seem to be so few Kindles yet in the field.
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He appears to base it on his following of the sales status of a single title and extrapolating. He has made these kinds of projections before (not in regard to the Kindle but as to other matters) and has yet to be correct.
I have no idea how many ebooks are being sold daily for the Kindle, but trade papers seem to think that the production run for the Kindle was 50,000 units. Assuming all units have been sold, it would require 10% of buyers to buy a book a day, or every Kindle owner to buy 1 book every 10 days for the guesstimate to be accurate. I think that is contrary real expectations, even allowing for single buyers to make multiple purchases.
The other question -- that is, the one not yet raised but to me the more interesting one -- is assuming these numbers are correct, will the sales volume hold up (a) after the novelty of the Kindle has worn off and (b) after Amazon raises prices from the $9.99 mark. One must always keep in mind how the publishing industry works and that Amazon must make a profit at some point. I can't address the latter, but the former I can.
Generally a publisher "sells" a book at a 40-50% discount off list. If to a distributor, then the distributor keeps a percentage and what remains is for the retailer. Amazon probably gets the discount directly because of sales volume and because it acts as its own closed distributor. What it means is that Amazon is losing money on most bestsellers it sells at $9.99.
The unknown is whether book publishers are giving a steeper discount to Amazon for the ebook version, but from my years in the industry (25 of them), I'd say it was unlikely that the big publishers are; their financials are not in good enough shape.
So what will happen when $9.99 no longer gets you a bestseller? What will happen when Kindle users discover that they are paying $1.99 for books they can get for free elsewhere?
Even though I turned down a Kindle for Christmas, holding out for the Sony (which my family gave me and I have enjoyed ever since, 'lo these few weeks), I hope sales of Kindle ebooks are good. It would encourage publishers to do more ebook publishing and might ultimately force a single publishing standard.