View Single Post
Old 01-12-2012, 12:19 AM   #122
fjtorres
Grand Sorcerer
fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.fjtorres ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 11,732
Karma: 128354696
Join Date: May 2009
Location: 26 kly from Sgr A*
Device: T100TA,PW2,PRS-T1,KT,FireHD 8.9,K2, PB360,BeBook One,Axim51v,TC1000
Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks View Post
The lost sales are not the "free so I didn't have to pay." They are the "I didn't bother to buy anything on my wishlist because I picked up so many freebies this week." THOSE are the lost sales.
Ah, I see your position; the freebies crowd out the non-free book's mindshare.

It's possible.
But so far, it's not happening.
Paid ebook sales keep going up and for all the talk that "nobody" is making money in ebooks, a lot of people seem to be doing fine. Quarter by quarter, the dollar amounts grow and so does the size of the available book catalogs. And that ebook growth is outpacing the drop in pbook revenue at most of the BPHs.

I don't doubt that there are a fair amount of, ahem, frugal readers living off the freebies. Just as I don't doubt there is a fair amount of piracy out there.
But a lot of both is just hoarding and, just as every pirated ebook copy doesn't represent a lost sale for anybody, I don't think each and every freebie d/l corresponds to a lost sale for anybody, either.

All the publicly-available evidence so far suggests that the majority of readers do buy ebooks and that a good portion of the quality promo-ebooks result in increased sales for the author. Even the Price Fix Six seem to be doing okay despite their eroding ebook market share.

Whatever their numbers may be, it doesn't look like over-frugal readers are an industry-wide issue. It may come to pass or it may not.

And like I said, I wouldn't necessarilly take online chatter as representative of even B&N's customers, much less Sony, Kobo, or Amazon. The issue is worth considering but without actual data from Nielsen or another of the poll-takers...

After all, if it were really an issue, it is one that has a simple solution: stop freebie promos. As long as freebie promos continue, the signs I see say it is more of a solution (to obscurity) than a problem. So far.
fjtorres is offline   Reply With Quote