Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
Is it possible to find similar data on the number of legitimate purchases of a book on Amazon or similar? It would be interesting to compare figures for that Dragon Tattoo book.
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One of the major stumbling blocks in these discussions is that the Big 6 publishers, and the DRM-heavy ebookstores, absolutely refuse to release any hard data about sales. They'll release soundbite quotes--"digital sales up 37%!" or useless ratios--"more ebooks sold than hardcovers!"--but won't give a baseline to work from, and won't give dollar amounts, and won't say how many sales makes a "bestseller."
Rusch's recent post about publishers'
"trust me" approach shows how fuzzy the numbers have been for a long time; it's possible that publishers aren't used to actually dealing with hard-line numbers in any coherent way. (Of course they have production costs numbers. But they may not have "cost of printing book" and "cost of printing dust jacket" and "cost of wrapping dustjackets around the hardcovers" and "cost of packaging to ship" as separate costs, except at some low-level accounting subgroup. The high-end decision-making reports may just have "production costs" all in one line. And it may include the cost of replacing machinery and parking-meter costs for rush shipments.)
One of the things that's got to be terrifying them about ebooks is the incredible granularity of data... knowing *exactly* how many books sold at *exactly* which shops, to *exactly* how many buyers. They're swamped with data that they don't know what to do with; their economic models don't have a spot for those numbers.