|
Right now a lot of people seem to have forgotten that it is 2015 out there, not 2012 or even 2010.
eBook adoption is no longer tied to eink sales any more than it is tied to BPH ebook sales or even tradpub sales. The evolution of the industry is an ongoing process and the ebook world no longer looks or works anything like it did even two years ago. And where the media and most industry pundits are missing the boat is in the reliance of gross dollars spent by consumers as a metric.
All the stories about flat or declining ebook sales are based on a hidden assumption: that the average ebook price has remained steady. If that were the case, declining ebook grosses would mean declining ebook sales. But it doesn't. Not any more than declining eink sales mean decling ebook readership. In both cases what we are seeing is a change in behavior of consumers and since publishing is a business that has no significant understanding of consumer behavior they are yet again misreading the market.
Eink sales down?
Down from what level? 2011? Sure. Unavoidable.
2011-2012 is when the switch to near cost pricing dropped the price of eink readers by over 50%. Big price drops like that tend to not only draw in all the people who need or want the product but also a good number of people who *think* they might have a use for it (remember all the stories about eink readers languishing in drawers, unused?). They also draw in future shoppers, people who would've bought later (replacing their first gen readers, for example) but moved up their purchases to take advantage of the new pricing.
This shift created a bubble and bubbles invariably pop.
The biggest casualty of the 2011 sales rate was B&N; they looked at those sales and, thinking the party would continue, ordered up a zillion STRs and then failed to sell them. There's still supplies of new STRs floating around, three years later.
So yes, new eink reader sales are down.
But that says nothing about eink *usage*.
Because nobody knows for sure what the usable life cycle of the things is like. There's people still reading happily on first gen readers from 2008 so when we hear reports of x-amount of readers sold in 2014 nobody has a clue how many are replacements for broken or obsoleted readers and how many are new adopters. It could be that 10% of the lower number are new adopters and the rest replacement sales or it could be 90% new adopters.
And nobody knows which.
(Well, except for Amazon but as usual, they aren't talking.)
Likewise, nobody else knows how many people are reading *exclusively* on phones, tablets, or PCs. (And given the growth of convertible PCs that last number is non-trivial. Not that it ever was.)
So, bottom line, one pbook retailer stopping B&M sales of Kindles?
Yeah, it happened. So what?
It tells us nothing.
Maybe they weren't selling there because would-be buyers don't think of bookstores as a place to buy consumer electronics. Maybe they were selling well enough but they didn't think the commission they got was big enough. Maybe they were selling like hotcakes and the publishers suggested it wasn't wise.
In the end, there are no tea leaves to read here.
It happened, move on.
Want to know where the commercial ebook business is headed? Look elsewhere.
|