Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Are there less readers? Are people reading less? Perhaps, though I rather doubt it. Certainly many of us on Mobileread are reading even more, though we are not of course typical. I suspect the main reason is that there are more readers reading more books, but this increase in demand is far exceeded by the exponential increase in supply. I also think best sellers such as Grisham also suffer from the high ebook prices set by their publishers. Ebooks are discoverable everywhere and immediately available. When you take your ereader to the airport you don't need to buy from a bookshop and their carefully curated selection of paperback blockbusters. There is an Amazon store right there with you. This of course fits in quite well with KKR's reasoning referred to above. Many travellers who just wanted something not terrible to read on the plane who would have visited the airport shop and bought John Grisham's latest on the front table at $15.99 are no longer doing so.
|
I have no idea what the real numbers are (and I live in France, where "major publishers" are not the only actors by far - there are lots and lots of small or mid-size publishers), but I'd be surprised, if, at least here, ebook sales were a large part of all book sales. I do see a lot of people (and by that I mean, perhaps one person in 10 or 20) reading ebooks in public transportation, but it's still a small part of the general public. Among people I know (mostly highly educated, probably reading much more than average), maybe one person in 10 owns an e-reader.
So, I'd look somewhere else for reasons why major bestsellers sell fewer books than they (or other major bestsellers) used to - typically, economic reasons. If your reader base is largely composed of people who have less freely disposable income, it is to be expected that they will buy fewer books. People who used to buy, say, 4 or 5 books a year (most likely highly visible - bestsellers) will cut down to 1 or 2.