Quote:
Originally Posted by Synamon
His comment that his digital to paper sales ratio is declining is an interesting data point and clearly skews his perspective. I suspect this holds true for most bestselling/blockbuster authors, since attaining that level of sales means capturing a lot of casual readers. Casual readers picking up only a few books a year won't be reading digitally on a Kindle and they probably don't care what the book costs.
But he's shortsighted if he thinks the status quo is representative of the future. More and more people have tablets and phones and even casual readers will eventually move to digital content. They'll have more choice (content and price), from public domain classics to backlist bestsellers of years gone by to indie hits everyone is talking about on social media, rather than the 20 current paperback bestsellers racked at Walmart. He's probably right to be wary of the digital future and defensive of the publishing industry that's made him rich.
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Great point. I tend to forget that MR represents a rather narrow view of the reading public. But I know from personal experience that the annual trip to Borders to stock up on books for vacation is no more, and if I see a book that looks particularly attractive in an airport newsstand (assuming I don't already have it or have it on hold at my library), I just download it at the airport. I can't recall the series I was reading on one vacation, and on the trip home I noticed the next book was out in the series. Since I only had a chapter or two left on the last book of the series, I purchased and downloaded the book before we boarded. Since we were separated on the trip home, I was really glad I was absorbed in a book.
But, as much as I love my kindle (or kindle app) and love reading, I love playing video games, reading magazines from the library on my tablet, watching movies from Amazon Prime, and knitting. And, while I know the book will be better, it will take 5 hours versus 2 hours for the movie. Now, rather than make a trip to the bookstore, I make sure to download whatever I want to watch on my Fire.
Child is right, the kindle is so 2012. But the Fire, or iPad, or whatever device I sideload books onto is not. I avoided getting e versions of knitting books for the longest time, until I borrowed one I had in hardcover in ebook format from my library. I loved it! I got a bunch of knitting books, converted them to epub and sideloaded them to my ipad. For the past month, I have read only on my paperwhite while going to sleep. During the day, I knit, or read about knitting on my ipad (I don't count that as reading, because it is mostly pictures).
Child is absolutely WRONG when he thinks he will get the readers at $15 and then a year later get them at $10. When I go to get ebooks from my library, I always sort by publication date. There are too many books coming out--I can't keep up. My library is buying a lot of backlist books--if I run out of everything else, or get caught up in a series, I may look for them, or buy a backlist book to round out the series, because my library doesn't have it. But that book isn't $10, it is $5.
What the authors and publishers don't understand is that their most lucrative base-the voracious readers, who bought hardcovers and paid to join frequent buyer clubs at B&N to get discounts on those hardcovers, have moved on. I am so over hardcover books. They are expensive, unwieldy, hard to read in the dark, and dirty if I borrow them from the library. I will not pay $15 for your ebook that I cannot lend to a friend. Actually, you may get paid for your ebook, but since I don't have a pile on my bedside table anymore, I may not read it for years. I just finished Under the Dome. (It had such a lame ending, I am not rushing to read King's newest, although I did get it from the library.) So you are going to have a harder time building up new readers. And if everyone isn't reading your book at the same time, conversations about it aren't going to happen.
The times, they are a changing.