From Shatzkin (with Data Guy quotes):
https://www.idealog.com/blog/changin...#disqus_thread
1- Agency really is stupid, after all:
Quote:
When the combination of the new technologies accelerated the shift from buying in stores to buying online, and Amazon showed a willingness to sell ebooks for Kindle at prices below the costs publishers charged them, the big legacy publishers became alarmed. They could see no end to the switch to ebooks and it seemed logical to figure out a way to encourage competition across ebook ecosystems.
Their solution, aided and abetted by the new Apple iBooks ecosystem that debuted in April of 2010, was to move from “wholesale” pricing, where the retailer controlled the ultimate price to the consumer, to “agency”, where the publisher was the seller to the consumer and controlled the price. The intermediary — the retailer — was just an “agent” without pricing power.
This led to anti-trust action by the US government by which agency pricing was allowed, but only by newly negotiated agreements between each of the major publishers and their vendors, including Amazon. And the DOJ made sure that those agreements entitled the retail “agent” to discount from the publisher’s agency price, as long as the aggregated discounts to consumers didn’t exceed the retailers’ aggregate margin on those ebooks.
They needn’t have bothered. Amazon was essentially done with the strategy of discounting big publishers’ ebooks. And big publishers are left wondering whether they should be glad they got what they wished for. Let’s remember that those discounts from Amazon came from their share of the price; now with agency protocols, publishers can only discount ebooks by reducing their own take!
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Hey! So it turns out Amazon was actually helping the BPHs under wholesale!
2 - The touted print sales growth is all at Amazon and it is all Amazon and Indie titles most likely.
Quote:
Amazon continues to grow its share of print and digital sales. It appear to be approaching half of all print sales and more than 90% of ebook sales.
Data Guy says:
On the print front, Amazon is indeed very close to half the US market: Our own Bookstat-derived total of 312 million print units sold by Amazon in 2017 is 45.5% of Bookscan’s total reported 2017 print sales of 687 million, which means Amazon sales now comprise the majority of Bookscan’s “Club & Retail” share. Even allowing for the other 15%-20% of US print sales that remain untracked by Bookscan, that puts Amazon’s US print share is at least 40%. And that’s ignoring another 10-15 million unreported Amazon print sales a year from CreateSpace titles that aren’t trackable through Ingram “expanded distribution.”
Amazon’s share of of US print sales is still growing rapidly. In the prior year, 2016, the 280 million Amazon online print sales Bookstat reports were only 41.7% of 674 million total units and in 2015 Bookstall’s 246 million print unit total for Amazon was only 37.7% of Bookscan’s 653 million reported units. So Amazon’s online print sales continue to grow by a double digit percentage each year.
Barnes & Noble — the next largest retailer of print books, from their public financial reporting, was by our math contributing 23% of Bookscan’s total in 2017 — which means that B&N has shrunk to where it now moves only half as many print books a year as Amazon, and B&N’s own financials show those remaining B&N sales are shrinking by 4% a year. Book sales at mass merchandisers like Walmart and Costco — about 14% of Bookscan’s total units — are dropping 7-8% a year. The indie bookstores, which make up less than 6% of the US print book market, have been a beneficiary of B&N’s shrinking footprint and sales are about flat. But even if they were growing, this is a segment too small to really move the needle.
In other words, the overall 2-3% annual growth in print sales reported by the industry for the past several years is solely due to Amazon’s fast-growing online print sales, while all other channels shrunk.
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Note that the shrinking channels all boycott APub titles and refuse most Indie titles.
3- Avid readers have moved away from B&M to online and digital. The fabled stroll through the racks is largely a myth.
Quote:
... as a result of these industry changes, some genres and categories of books are getting almost all their sales through Amazon. That would mean that nobody else can do those books profitably. This appears to have already happened with romance books; other genres and topical categories will follow.
Data Guy says:
I’d expand your observation to say “through Amazon and other online retailers,” but what you describe is what the data shows. Almost 90% of Romance book purchases are online now, mostly in ebook form, with the majority of those sales going to self-published titles in the $3-$5 range. Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy titles are not too far behind. In general, the strongest indicator for how fast sales in a particular book genre will transition to online retailers and digital formats is typical reader “voracity” in that genre. A three-book-a-year reader is usually picking up their three books in hardcover in airports or brick-and-mortar bookstores (or receiving them as holiday gifts). But most fifty-book-a-year genre fiction readers are, by now, buying those books online, and most probably as ebooks—which usually means that half or more of them are self-published purchases.
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Much more at the source.
Shatzkin has come a long way from the time when he demonized DataGuy claiming he had "an agenda". Mind you, he still pines for government action against Amazon but...
...well, baby steps...
