[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

The big boys are generally profitable, overall.
About 11% margin worth of profits.
(Smaller publishers... it varies. Which is why the big boys keep finding acquisition targets.)

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014...actually-make/

On the other hand, if you look at their profits, most of it comes from ebooks, which account for 20%-plus of their revenues.

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014...big-publisher/

Depending on how you interpret the public data you could make a case that pbook publishing is a money loser.

Thank you for those links. These are very interesting for several reasons:

• a big part of good ebook sales is supported by only one to three exceptionally well doing titles per publisher
• including those titles is the Divergent series which might explain the rise of YA mentioned in original article in this thread
• S&S had some good success through subscription services Oyster and Scribd and their backlist - they always had and still consider Kindle Unlimited as a possible candidate in the future (very interesting, IMO)
• strong ebook sales increase the net profit percent overall - this one should not be a surprise, but it is not the "ebooks hurt pbook sales" either

You would think, that publishers looking at these numbers would start pushing ebook sales instead of hinder them. In the case of at least one big publisher (Simon & Schuster) Amazon is not seen as the evil empire out to destroy publishers. The sooner the publishers embrace this new thing called ebooks, the sooner they can make money by adopting.