Quote:
Originally Posted by DMB
Any ideas about the cause of the decline in ebook sales?
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eBook sales overall haven't declined.
The sales of the (traditional) publishers tracked by AAP have declined but the rest of the US ebook market is still growing nicely. Enough to offset the losses reported by the AAP publishers and more.
It is a long story...
http://authorearnings.com/report/sep...rnings-report/
http://authorearnings.com/report/oct...-ebook-market/
http://authorearnings.com/report/feb...rnings-report/
...that can be summarized as:
Starting in sept 2014, the five Big Publishing Houses owned by giant multinationals negotiated no-discount Agency ebook contracts with Amazon (and the other "major" ebook retailers) and proceeded to raise average ebook prices from US$9.99 to $12.99 and up, generally higher than their print editions. The idea was to drive consumer sales to their print editions.
One small problem: there is no shortage of quality ebooks priced at $9.99 and under. (Way under...)
At the Amazon ebookstores half of unit sales of ebooks are going to Indie publishers, books that have an average price of slightly under $4, with a strong plurality at $2.99. In that environment, raising prices that were already triple the Indie baseline by a third is proving to be... less than wise.
30% price hikes = 22% declines. And counting.
(And few if any net readers have moved back to print. Instead, the net movement away from BPH titles.)
The BPHs have annoyed a lot of their readers but they have made a lot of their competitors happy.
Oh, and those Agency contracts? Multi-year...
They have at least two more years to run.