E-book Sales Are Exploding And Hurting Paperbacks, Publishers Say

[carld]

I don't know if this is anything new, but it's an interesting, short read.

Link to PaidContent.org

[Sil_liS]

If they show the growth of ebook sales, is it really that difficult to show the decline of pbook sales?
What does:

The paperback fiction market this year is down seven percent in trade value - I put this almost entirely down to ebook sales ... the mass-market paperback is the thing we’re going to cannibalise most.

mean anyway? And are they going to stop printing mmpb because of ebooks?

And the nice graph doesn't make sense either. The last point for the US market is 12.70% but it is on the 16% line.

[wayrad]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

And the nice graph doesn't make sense either. The last point for the US market is 12.70% but it is on the 16% line.

Yeah, it's clear as mud - I'm guessing that maybe the axis represent percent of book buyers that bought ebooks, and the data labels are percent of purchased books that were ebooks. Or possibly vice versa, who knows?

[jbcohen]

Great maybe some of those throwbacks will come to their senses. Don't hold out much hope for my own parents, the technology in their home is all circa 1967, they still have a turn table for crying out loud, just lucky they have concented to a basic cell phone.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by wayrad

Yeah, it's clear as mud - I'm guessing that maybe the axis represent percent of book buyers that bought ebooks, and the data labels are percent of purchased books that were ebooks. Or possibly vice versa, who knows?

I thought of that, but both titles of the mystery graph have "book buyers" in them.

[WillAdams]

Of course, it couldn't possibly be that in an effort to maximize their profits the publishers are printing multiple sizes of books even for series which were never published in more than one size (e.g., Steven Brust's _Iorich_ --- I currently have that series shelved on a short shelf which the current tall paperback won't fit on, so I'm not buying until they sell a copy which will fit along w/ the others)

[Sydney's Mom]

I'm confused by calling this news. Although ebook readers are not commonplace, ebook readers tend to buy more books than none ebooks readers. Duh

[leebase]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

If they show the growth of ebook sales, is it really that difficult to show the decline of pbook sales?
What does:

mean anyway? And are they going to stop printing mmpb because of ebooks?

It likely doesn't matter one bit to the publisher whether ebooks are taking sales away from mmpb. Money is money, after all.

Now if you are SELLING mmpb's, but you don't sell ebooks - THEN this would be a disturbing trend.

Are they going to stop printing mmpb? Well, consider music cd's. There was a time when entire stores existed to do nothing but sell music. With the rise of eMusic (both legal and illegal), the sales of cd's plummeted and with them the dedicated music store. Now you can only find cd's as departments within stores like WalMart/Target and the like.

We see in the bankruptcy of Borders that the day of the dedicated book store is threatened.

10 years out -- yes, it is possible that mmpb's will have gone the way of the dodo.

Lee

[CWatkinsNash]

E-book Sales Are Exploding And Hurting Paperbacks, Publishers Say

... the mass-market paperback is the thing we’re going to cannibalise most.

Out of the mouths of CEOs... When they use the negative word "cannibalise" it's just more proof that they were woefully unprepared.

When I'm not browsing ebooks, I enjoy browsing tool catalogs. Let's say Honeywell has a set of ratcheting box wrenches, rated for 10,000VA, for $1100 or thereabouts. Then they start selling a new set of wrenches, that can do mostly the same things as the other wrenches, but have a different design and don't take up as much room in the toolbox. They also sell these for about $1100. I would think that Honeywell would expect sales of the new wrenches to reduce sales of the old wrenches, because:

• Most people are either in the market for wrenches or they aren't - there will be some people who might suddenly want wrenches that didn't want them before, but the majority were already looking for wrenches. If a new market for wrenches is created, it will be a small one compared to the existing market.
• Most people don't need both sets of wrenches. Unless they hoard wrenches. Hey, it happens. I'm sure there are people who could use a version of calibre for wrenches.

So Honeywell would plan accordingly, keep a close eye on the wrench market and adjust production as needed. What they would NOT do is compensate by pulling their products from tool rental shops or padlock the new wrenches to the purchaser so that no one else can use them.

[Worldwalker]

Printed books cut into the sales of hand-written books, too. And codices really munged up the sales of scrolls. Technology happens.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

Out of the mouths of CEOs... When they use the negative word "cannibalise" it's just more proof that they were woefully unprepared.

No, it means that the new format is not taking away business from competitors, it's taking away business from the existing sales structure.

It's a commonly used term, and she is using it properly.

Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

....Honeywell would plan accordingly, keep a close eye on the wrench market and adjust production as needed. What they would NOT do is compensate by pulling their products from tool rental shops or padlock the new wrenches to the purchaser so that no one else can use them.

Your wrench example does not match the paper/ebook example. Here's a better one.

Honeywell puts out a series of high-quality wrenches for $1000, and makes $100 in profit off of each set. A competitor puts out a set of wrenches that are not quite as good for $600, and Honeywell's wrench sales plummet. Honeywell decides to compete, and puts out a set of lower-quality wrenches for $500, and makes $50 in profit off of each set. The lower-quality wrenches sell very well, but the higher-end sales continue to fall.

In that scenario, Honeywell chose to sacrifice the higher-end higher-margin sales to its own lower-cost lower-margin sales, rather than let the competition take its business away. Any time a customer chooses a Honeywell lower-end wrench set over the higher-end wrench set, that is a "cannibalized" sale.


It is very rare for any business that is actually good at what it does to be able to turn around its entire business model on a dime. In fact, that isn't always a good thing to do -- since a likely result is that the company will expend lots of time, energy, and scarce resources pursuing the Unprofitable and Unsustainable Fad of the Week.

Oh, and I'm guessing that at least the American publishers realized well over a year ago that ebooks were going to cannibalize print sales. That's why they leaped at Apple (and Google) offering them agency pricing, and proceeded to ram it down Amazon's throat.

[DuskyRose]

Originally Posted by leebase

Are they going to stop printing mmpb?

Well, I haven't seen any articles for a few years, but I've been reading about writing/publishing for years here and there, and I can swear I saw several articles about the publishers phasing out MMPB as the Baby Boomers ages. Probably about 7-10 years ago?

IIRC, the thinking as that they basically were going to drop MMPB all together and go to tradesize, as both Hardbacks and Tradesize could use the same innerds, and just vary the binding. Because they make a lot more on a Tradesize than a MMPB, and they could adjust the fonts easier.

I've noticed more of my favorite series are coming out in all those weird sizes anymore, and in tradeback instead of paperback. Which is why I just jumped to ebooks when it started happening because I don't like HB or tradesize.

Wish I could find those old articles/conversations, but I've thought MMPB's were on the doomed list anyway, as "Aging Eyes" was going to be a good excuse to get rid of the low moneymaker in favor of a better one.

[crich70]

Printed books also increased the circulation of books compared to the handwritten versions as well. I mean if it takes a yr or two to hand write one copy of a book and it only takes a matter of days to print the same book (back when printing 1st started in bulk) you are going to increase the # of copies which will bring the price per copy down, and ebooks certainly should continue that trend I would think since 1000's of people can download a copy of the same book in mere minutes as opposed to how long it would take the same # of printed copies to reach the reading public. I think what it really comes down to is people don't like to change. Doing the same old thing as always has been is comfortable. You see the same thing in scientific progress. A new theory doesn't become established because people automatically accept it, but because those who clung to the old way of thinking about how the world works die off and the next generation grows up with the 'new theory' of how things work.The idea that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa is a good example of this. The old established way of thinking said the sun went round the earth and it took quite a while for the correct model of the solar system to be accepted. I can see the pbook vs. ebook situation going much the same way. In a few generations pbooks will be antiques and libraries like what people have been known to frequent for the last few centuries will be museum exhibits.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Printed books cut into the sales of hand-written books, too. And codices really munged up the sales of scrolls. Technology happens.

[CazMar]

I don't dispute the figures or the fact that all of this is happening - but with so many people saying it was going to happen (and don't forget sites like Teleread have been around for years talking about the advent of ebooks etc etc), why do the book publishers now seem surprised by all of this? Car manufacturers are working flat out to try to produce electric cars, hybrid cars etc because they know gasoline engines have a limited number of years, but book publishers act like they have been suddenly hit with this "digital" stuff.

[crich70]

I think that it's a matter of being able to be willfully blind to what is coming. The car manufacturers can see that oil reserves are getting lower and that fuel emissions pollute the air but it's easier to turn a blind eye to statistics about pbooks vs. ebooks since it is a digital medium that is being talked about. You can demonstrate a real steam turbine or gasoline engine, but fusion power is still more theory than actual for example. We tend to believe more in what we can see, hear, touch and measure with our own senses than some mathmatical formula that says something like pbooks are declining in popularity and ebooks are rising at the same rate. It's not as real when it's a mathmatical abstraction on paper as opposed to a warehouse that suddenly is a lot more empty than it was five yrs ago.

Originally Posted by CazMar

I don't dispute the figures or the fact that all of this is happening - but with so many people saying it was going to happen (and don't forget sites like Teleread have been around for years talking about the advent of ebooks etc etc), why do the book publishers now seem surprised by all of this? Car manufacturers are working flat out to try to produce electric cars, hybrid cars etc because they know gasoline engines have a limited number of years, but book publishers act like they have been suddenly hit with this "digital" stuff.