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#1 |
Grand Sorcerer
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Streaming, Sharing, Stealing
There is a new book out called Streaming, Sharing, Stealing. One chapter in it contains an analysis of ebooks verses paper books. Specifically, they look at the effect of ebook sales on hardback sales. They were hired by one of the big publishers to do an analysis, so they were working with the real data from the publisher, not the estimated data that is publicly available.
The details are a bit much to post here, so if you are interested, I would suggest getting the book, but basically, they found that ebook sales have no effect on hard back sales. They also determined that if you delay the ebook sales, then not only does that not improve the hardback sales, it decreases the ebook sales. This, of course, implies that Robert Jordan's widow was being counter productive when she decided to delay the ebook version of the final Wheel of Time books so the hardback copies would sale better. When a company delays the ebook release, the customers are more likely to either get the pirated version of it, or simply move on to something else. Another point they made is that digital sales tends to be a very different animal than non digital sales. One example was DVD verse streaming. For Blockbuster, it turned out that something like 85% of their rentals were a small subset of available DVD's, i.e. the big hits. For streaming, it turns out just the opposite, the titles are much more diverse and the big hits tend to account for a minority of the rentals. All in all, a very interesting book, one that goes into a lot of detail on the business models and measured consumer behaviors. |
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#2 |
Bookaholic
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Link to the book on Amazon...
Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment |
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#3 |
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IMHO, too expensive.
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#4 |
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#5 |
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Alas, not available through either of my Overdrive libraries - even for recommendation.
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#6 |
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I asked the book from my library, they should import it in a month or so.
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#7 |
Grand Sorcerer
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As I like to say, you may not always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.
For the most part, specialized books have a smaller audience and thus tend to be more expensive. It's actually seems more academic. The WSJ reviewed it today. The big reason that I mentioned it was because of the two points that I mentioned in the original post, i.e. ebook sales don't effect Hardback sales, while delaying ebook sales tend to be counter productive and digital sales have a different dynamic than in store sales. The later seems fairly intuitive to me, but it's always good to have data confirm it. I think that the two points together say some interesting things about the ebook market. Last edited by pwalker8; 09-07-2016 at 12:40 PM. |
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#8 |
Wizard
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If only they had put it on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited, that would be streaming.
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#9 |
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#10 |
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They do. One of the charts includes data from when one of the publishers was being locked out by Amazon during their contract negotiation, so it was post Cote. Keep in mind that many publisher's individual contracts with Amazon use the agency model now, so pre-agency and post-agency doesn't really mean what you think it does. The Cote ruling was so long ago that if someone is using data from pre-Cote, then it's way out dated.
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#11 |
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Thanks for posting.this. I won't be purchasing the Book because IMHO it is too expensive, and whilst I am interested in the topic I'm not that interested!
I do not find the conclusion that there is little or no relationship between hardback and ebook sales surprising. This is because I think the market for hardbacks is generally very different from the market for ebooks, though I also speculate there are some who buy both. I suspect a lot of people who buy hardbacks are people who really care about the particular format and want a nice, durable print book which will last if taken care of. These would include collectors and those who take pride in their print book library and often have it on display for admiration by not only themselves but also others. Some may even buy the hardback for their library and the ebook or paperback to actually read. For this market an ebook or paperback copy simply does not suffice. So far as windowing is concerned, I don't think it is rocket science to predicate that in this market with so much choice it will be counter-productive. |
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#12 |
Grand Sorcerer
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University Press.
In this case MIT. I hope Negroponte isn't involved. Here's the WSJ article. Will probably expire. http://www.wsj.com/article_email/wer...MDAwODcwNDgzWj |
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#13 |
Grand Sorcerer
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The one thing that pre-Cote-ruling/pre-original-agency-pricing data would have shown us, is whether or not select $9.99 ebook prices were hurting hardback sales either. It would have been nice to be able to show that publishers were wrong right across the board when it came to their "protecting our hardback market" rationale.
![]() It's not at all surprising to me that ebooks priced similarly to hardbacks does not affect hardback sales (sort of a no-brainer) ... nor that windowing didn't sell more hardbacks (we all suspected as much). Always nice to have some hard data that shows much of the fear-induced, ebook-diddling, hardcover-protecting hooey was in fact hooey, though. |
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#14 | |
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Quote:
One thing that I liked about the book is that it give a very detailed explanation of the publishers' economic model, and why it works for books, but doesn't work for some other things. It's one of the best explanations that I've read. I have a certain amount of sympathy for the publishers with regards to ebooks simply because early in the ebook process, I read a lot of angst about ebooks from various authors, including some one wouldn't think. I read one fairly popular SF author who called his backlist his 401K. To a great extent, that's how many authors say it. Their backlist books got released every 6 or 7 years, which generated a fairly steady stream of revenue. So I can see why they were worried about it. It's pretty easy to worry about things when there is no data to give guidance. Now we have a fair amount of data. Baen had been doing ebooks since 1998, Amazon since 2007. As far as I can tell, that one author seems to be pretty happy with his ebook sales. |
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#15 | |
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