Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
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Amazon won't release absolute numbers. And the big publishers don't tend to say much either, although there might be something in their annual and quarterly reports.
The AAP and IDPF do provide figures, although they are limited. They report wholesale income from 12 to 15 trade publishers in the US only, excluding library, educational and professional sales.
With these caveats, the numbers are interesting.
http://idpf.org/about-us/industry-statistics
Their graph fitting is terrible though — they seem to trying to fit to a quadratic polynomial!
I attach a better graph, with wholesale income shown on a logarithmic scale. Note that ebook income is increasing at a greater than logarithmic rate (otherwise it would be a straight line). The fit shown is a double exponential curve.
Note the odd drop in income in Q2 of 2010. I wonder what happened then. Oh! Agency pricing...
I also attach a graph with a linear dollar scale.