Quote:
Originally Posted by Blossom
The unemployment rate is seriously altered. There are so many people out of work right now but unemployment laws have changed so they don't qualify for unemployment and are not counted in that percentage.
Sent from my XT1528
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Correct.
Official stats are seriously flawed in many ways and in no way reflect the state of the economy much less the book market.
The book market has been mostly driven by BPH pricing policies and those policies over the past six years have been for higher prices. In the process, they have provided a big price umbrella for Indies and smaller tradpubs.
As pointed out by Maria there has indeed been a big hike in BPH ebook prices in the past two years.
It was intended to drive sales from ebooks to pbooks.
It sort of succeeded, for a while, but one side effect was to draw BPH sales away from non-Amazon ebookstores to Amazon online pbook sales. That weakened non-Kindle ebookstores.
Getting back to Samhain, they were primarily a publisher; their bookstore, like BAEN's was a supplement to their main business. Their failure is due mostly to the forces impacting Indies and tradpubs and less so the forces affecting ebookstores in general. Whatever the BPHs have been up to is mostly irrelevant in that sphere. With one exception:
In the last year the bigger tradpubs have latched on to Bookbub as a means to promote their backlist titles on markdown. They have crowded out a lot of Indies and small presses and Bookbub does drive a fair amount of sales. Especially among people pining for gatekeeping. This has shifted a fair amount of sales away from smaller publishers.