Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Meh. I looked at their website, fairly thoroughly, and see no way that would indicate how on earth they'd calculate that. They all come out of trade-pubbing (which means...a definite skew on the view), and how *would* they "count" sales?
By trade-publishers, through Books In print--which only tracks books that have ISBNs? Amazon's not saying; nor does anyone else report on this. It's daft. And I'll say--without blinking--that number is bollocks. 64%? Nyet. I don't have a single client selling under 80% on Amazon, in terms of total sales and as I said, most are far greater, even those distributing via LSI, IS, BookBaby, etc.
Hitch
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Codex Group is Peter Hildick-Smith - we consulted with him when we started out and could work with him again if we decide to go that route/it seems right. He is extremely knowledgeable. He is a former Marketing VP for Del Rey and launched the natural product line for Quaker and his partner is a Wharton MBA with lots of additional marketing experience. He not only has experience, he performs ongoing analysis of the records that are available (granted, they are awful and incomplete). Volume-wise, e-books in general, are probably between 15 and 20% of the total book market. In this, I don't mean just trade publishing (where they are still about 25%), I mean all things put in book form - trade, educational, technical, religious, everything. Peter understands everything we say about marketing and agrees with us. Where we part with him is that he is all about refining marketing for current products and current audiences. That's great for the former Harlequin or any other well-recognized genre/type of book - not so good in a lot of other areas.
I showed y'all that homely PDF book for a reason. The actual text is the most-adopted of its type in North America (probably English-speaking world) in general. It is from what I call "BDSM" - Bedford/St. Martins - a subdivision of Macmillan. It probably ships a million units each semester. Obviously there is a big need for this book to be in electronic form and usable by students. A low-adopted, more specialized text with the same editor for Pearson ships 50,000 books per semester. Out of those numerous students who HAVE TO BUY THIS BOOK either new or used, a tremendous number would buy the e-book I got the "free trial" of, if it were even remotely usable. That is a vast amount of money and would bump up e-book sales hugely. This book cannot be used as intended in present flowable ePub form. New methods are needed if that technology or system is desired.
Now, do you understand what I am saying?
Hitch, if you could make such books work, you would probably have zero business complaints because you wouldn't be "white labeling" smaller projects. You could charge high prices for what an excellent book designer does for a print book and charge for updates on a continuous basis.
It should go without saying this is a lot of work and very intensive work.
I surveyed my students in a 33-member class today. Out of the group, 3 used Kindles - two used much older ones, and one had a Kindle Fire. This is *very* unusual. The two older ones were "hand me downs" from older relatives. So 10% of the group, average age 19 or 20, and all said they used the devices to read for pleasure, never for school. They all said they use paper textbooks for school.
In this case, the situation isn't that educators are stupid and stuck on the old paper books and don't "get it." The difference between pleasure reading of a novel or popular non-fiction book with few or no illustrations, and what happens with a textbook (note taking, questions, workbooks, etc) is vast.