Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
This possibly means that the heavy readers are reading more books (for the reasons you mentioned above) but they are not enough to offset the decreases elsewhere.
|
It is possible since Agency pricing *is* driving sales to print.
But...
The "gains" in print aren't terribly big, compared to the BPH ebook declines, and the market as a whole is still growing. Just in areas that appeal to avid readers instead of casuals. What Agency is doing is disincentivize casuals from sampling ebooks so, yes, the number of people reading one or two ebooks a year is almost certainly declining. But heavy readers gain too many benefits from ebooks to ignore the format.
What we're seeing is a sorting of readers as avid, regular readers move to digital and casuals stay with print. The divide is already hardening, as reflected in the declining sales of tradpub frontlist. With avid readers spreading their buys around to backlist, midlist, and indies, even tbe big name authors are seeing big declines in launch window sales.
Avid readers are big drivers of the buzz that spurs casual reader purchases.
Their migration is reshaping the business in ways that are only noticeable if you pay attention to the author side of the supply chain. The media pays too much attention to the middlemen like Amazon and the publishers and nowhere near enough to the actual producers, the authors.
That is where the future of books is being shaped, by their distribution choices, not by the number of ereaders or tablets. After all, content consumption devices are just a means to an end. And the endpoint is the stories.
In the end, ebooks mean more books and more reading.
Everything else is making sausage.
