For those skeptical of the Author Earnings statistical methodology Jane Friedman has a very good piece on a similar topic, based on tradpub ISBN data via Nielsen:
https://janefriedman.com/myth-print-...okstores-rise/
Pretty pictures, too.
Quote:
3. Market share is drifting away from the Big Five publishers to small presses and self-publishers.
Nielsen’s latest report is very instructive. In this chart, we see how the share of Big Five publishers has declined by 12% over the last three years; small publishers and self-published authors have gained 23% market share combined. What’s even more astonishing is that Nielsen’s figures primarily give us a look at very traditional types of publishing, or books with ISBNs. There’s a whole universe of independent publishing that remains untracked because the titles don’t carry ISBNs—and most of those titles are not getting carried in your average bricks-and-mortar bookstore. They sell predominantly through Amazon.
Carry a big dose of skepticism, and look at possible underlying agendas, when you hear celebrations about print’s comeback.
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That last sentence, from a tradpub veteran and insider is, well... interesting.
Anyway, since she has access to the full report, she knows the exact size of the coloring book boom. And it is double what I expected. 12m adult coloring books sold in 2015 v 1m in 2014 mean 11M added coloring books. (I'd estimated 5M from Publishers Weekly data.) That totally wipes out the 1 percent pbook gain they've been crowing about. In reality, text-based tradpub pbook sales *declined* along with tradpub ebooks.
No spiders involved in that report.
Two of the comments add good insight:
Quote:
Vicki Weisfeld
Very helpful discussion. However, there is a common misinterpretation of the second chart. The text says “the share of Big Five publishers has declined by 12% over the last three years.” That’s incorrect. It has declined by 12 “percentage points.” The actual decline is 26%–1minus 34/46. That’s more than a quarter! Similarly, while self-published and very small publishers have gained 23 “percentage points” in market share, they have actually gained an astonishing 220%! You’ll see this easily if you note that 42% is more than twice 19%.
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And:
Quote:
Michael W. Perry
The current mess has a reason. ISBNs exist as barcodes for printed books much like the barcodes on soup cans. There was no reason to keep that system for ebooks. A much more rationale system could have replaced it, one where the barcode itself could have portions that would define the content, the version, the formating, and any DRM. Authors and publishers would only need to buy and register the publisher/content portion. They could assign the latter numbers themselves. Readers would benefit too. The content and version number would tell them they were getting the same ebook, with only the format differing. That’d have been a much better scheme.
It is the major publishers who drove the industry to stick with ISBNs even for digital versions. My hunch is that covertly Bowker made them an offer. It would grossly overprice small quantities of ISBNs to burden independent authors and small publishers, while still selling ISBNs cheaply in bulk to large publishers. Faced with a rapidly changing market, large publishers weren’t trying to win any niceness prize.
That’s backfired. The result has been that many ebooks are no longer tied to ISBNs, with Amazon not insisting on them and Smashwords offering its own set of ISBNs for authors to meet the demands of those on its distribution chain, such as Apple and B&N, who insist on ISBNs. Rather than stengthen ISBN, the scheme weakened it.
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More at that source. And the discussions in those comments are ongoing.
Bottom line: readers are changing their buying habits and voting their wallets in new ways. Big winners: Indies, small presses, and coloring book publishers. (Most of which, BTW, are niche small presses.)