Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
(New) Print has been in decline all century and more. It has been masked by the use of retail dollar sales as a metric which allows price hikes and driving sales away from mass market to higher price formats like hardcover, trade paperback, and yes, ebooks to obscure lower unit sales. People have been buying less new print books year after year for decades.
So yes, all the net increase they cheer is at Amazon.
But there is another dirty secret nobody reports: B&M availability of midlist and backlist titles has declined dramatically and continues to. decline daily. Lost in the breathless cheers for the parallel zombie meme of "Independent bookstores are back" is that successful indie stores rely a lot on used books. And all book stores rely on the top selling titles from the "name" authors. So, when a Borders or B&N stocking say 50,000 titles closes and is replaced by an Indie store with 30,000 titles, the top sellers will remain available but there's an immediate loss of shelf space for 20, 000 titles. More if the. Indie bookstore is deep into used books.
This is non-trivial.
After all, the appeal of the megastores was their (for the times) deep catalogs.
When Borders was pushed into liquidation they took with them a quarter of the total available shelf space but, worse, they took something like half the midlist/backlist shelf space.
And that is why all their pbook market share ended up at Amazon.
Top sellers and recent releases are "everywhere" books. You can find them at supermarkets, newstands, drug stores, and bookstores big and small. But midlist/ backlist? Good luck finding them at B&M.
Of course, there's always Amazon. And ebooks...
For all the whining over Amazon pricing their real advantage is availability. You can't buy what you can't find.
The more tradpub pushes their loyalists to print, the more power they give to Amazon.
The best way to reduce Amazon' s market power is to grow ebook sales. At least that way Apple and Kobo,etc have a shot.
Print isn' t back. And even if it were, it would not be a good thing.
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You are right but still I miss Borders and browsing just like I miss the occasional "book fair" where a large defunct store would be rented and old shelves and new shelves would be stocked with over runs, etc at very cheap prices. I loved those. Now you might have an occasional church sale of old donated books.
And most of all I miss my old library from my childhood where all those old volumes of "forgotten lore" would be on the dim and lightly dusty (less dusting back in the back) shelves in the back. That was where the old SciFi books were. The old red covered "John Carter of Mars" series when Edgar Rice Burroughs went "intestate," and the Hobbit. Ah, the discoveries I made in those dusty carrels. Like discovering gold in a forgotten mine. [[And where is my old Mining friend whom I used to converse with on this forum? I need to contact him I guess.]]