Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
No. They are not missing the point. It is like looking at the music industry but disregarding the very substantial market share of subscription streaming services. The fact that there is no agreed or perfect method to compare a read on KU with an actual sale does not justify disregarding it.
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Fair enough. But in the music industry, sales of physical media are actually declining year by year. So there is no question that the digital market is having a real effect -- and while digital downloads are growing, you're right that in order to assess the market as a whole we have to take into account streaming services like Spotify.
But there are crucial differences, namely that (a) paper book sales are not trending downwards in a similar manner (in the UK, for example, print is up, see
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-uk-book-sales) and (b) the structure of the publishing industry means that a lot of well-known authors are not on KU or other subscription services (whereas the artist who's not on Apple Music or Spotify is the rare exception).
The fact that print sales are increasing is in itself a very good indication that digital is not having a hugely detrimental effect on sales at the moment. You can make the argument (as it seems to me that you do below) that new sales channels have created a new market that wasn't there before, so that the market as a whole has actually increased. But that's fine, of course none of the Big 5 would want to compete with a $1.29 self-published indie if their sales are holding steady. Why would they?
Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
The point which you seem to have missed is that these figures do not take account of the majority of ebook sales, even if you take no account whatsoever of KU. I will assume for the sake of this discussion that you are correct in identifying the question addressed in this thread as "whether ebooks are losing steam in "taking over the market"". In this case, these figures establish that the answer is affirmative for the books covered by the report, which are essentially traditionally published books. Their value in resolving the question so far as the entire market is concerned is at best indirect, as the enormous number of ebooks not taken into account tend towards a negative answer.
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Maybe if we go by sheer quantity of ebooks sold, the situation is a little different. Let's leave aside the not unimportant fact that print sales are doing very fine indeed, so we can't really say that they're "losing".
But what kind of metric is the one you're proposing? Isn't that comparing apples & oranges? Let's say that for the sake of the argument I grant you that the ebook market is slightly more than 50% indie & self-published (according to the Author Earnings website), that still leaves more than 40% for the Big 5 plus small/medium publishers.
And while the conventional wisdom here is that the Big 5 are all dinosaurs who don't know what they're doing, it seems to me that they have a point in the sense that as long as their market is strong (and it is), their need to lower prices is questionable at best.
I agree that the world of indie and self-publishing has enriched the book market. The fact that anyone can sell a book world-wide is a wonderful development.
I disagree on the effect that is actually having on the traditional (paper) book market. After an initial surge, ebook sales seem to have plateaud when it comes to traditional sales. Maybe we can sort of meet in the middle and agree that a new market has been created that is not served by the traditional publishing houses and is doing exceptionally well?
Matt