eBook sales are down 17%

[Fbone]

Judge's decision regarding Diesel and Books on Board:
https://www.law360.com/articles/8953...titrust-claims

And the appeal:
http://blogs.findlaw.com/second_circ...rust-case.html

[darryl]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Hum, let me pull up two recent best sellers
Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci (published Oct 17th, 2017)
Ron Chernow's Grant (published Oct 10th, 2017)

The paper price for the da Vinci book is $21, the Kindle price, $17
The paper price for the Grant book is $24, the Kindle price, $20

In both cases, the kindle price is basically at the discount price for the hardback. So I don't see a price discrimination against the ebook version, unless you are simply arguing that ebook prices should be much cheaper.

I am horrified by these ebook prices, and I am far from alone. Why on earth would I want to pay $20 or $17 for an ebook when I can buy Indie ebooks as good or better for a fraction of the price? To me this is the case with the vast majority of books. There are very rare exceptions where I really want to read a particular book. The authors I used to read before agency have all been replaced by Indies whose books are as good or in some cases better, with the exception of John Sandford. But I still refuse to pay the ridiculous publisher set price for his books, which I read through other (legal) means.

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Choosing price points for anything is more of an art than a science, but we do see a nice experiment in pricing going on.

I just bought book 5 of J.A. Sutherland's Alexis Carew series. Kindle price, either $5 or free if you have kindleunlimited. The paperback price is $18. Sutherland is an indie author and the paper version is via Amazon's Publishing Platform. I would predict that he's not going to sell many paper copies.

I agree with your prediction. His paper book is at Big 5 type prices. Amazon, unlike the Big 5, have priced the ebook at a reasonable level. The difference, of course, is that Amazon doesn't care about the ebook taking sales from the paper book. Or perhaps they even want to positively encourage ebook adoption. And, so far as ebooks are concerned, these are the prices the Big 5 must compete with, fantasies about all books being special snowflakes notwithstanding.

Originally Posted by pwalker8

With iTunes, you have a tiered pricing model. You can buy individual songs at $1.29, or the whole album at a much lower price than all the songs totaled. The album price costs about what the cd cost at Amazon. So, it seems to me that the big Publishers already are following the current music industry's lead in pricing. Digital media cost is fairly close to physical media cost. Movies are priced the same way, it cost the same for a digital copy of the movie as it does for a Blu-Ray copy.

Firstly, those industries have both moved on to the point where subscription services are a thriving model. But, of course, Amazon is producing its own TV and Movie content, as are Netflix and others. In the long term this will likely have an effect in those industries not dissimilar to the Indie Book market effect on Publishing. Amazon, Netflix and more innovative players have been frustrated by the attitudes and greed of the old players, and are not wedded to their legacy business practices. It is little wonder that they are taking the first steps towards the longer term goal of breaking the stranglehold on content of these "rights-holders". I'm not aware of what is currently happening in the music industry. The fact that Amazon and others are not producing their own music, at least as far as I'm aware, implies that perhaps the record labels have reached some sort of accommodation with them, at least for the moment.

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Now perhaps you are arguing that the published missed the boat by not selling the ebook versions directly. Some either do have or once had their own ebook stores. Baen has it's own monthly ebook bundle and has since 1999, which if we actually had sales figures, might give some interesting information. I do suspect that the fact that Baen ebooks are now available on Amazon probably is an indication though. I would suggest that most customers would rather shop somewhere than has all the books available, rather than go from publisher to publisher.

Of course five (or six at the time) different major publisher online stores was never going to cut it. Had they foreseen what was going to happen they could have cooperated on a single online store featuring all of their books. They seemed to have no trouble conspiring against Amazon later, so this would not have been beyond them. Structured and implemented intelligently it would have stood a much better chance of surviving any anti-trust concerns than their later obvious price-fixing conspiracy did.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by darryl

I am horrified by these ebook prices, and I am far from alone. Why on earth would I want to pay $20 or $17 for an ebook when I can buy Indie ebooks as good or better for a fraction of the price? To me this is the case with the vast majority of books. There are very rare exceptions where I really want to read a particular book. The authors I used to read before agency have all been replaced by Indies whose books are as good or in some cases better, with the exception of John Sandford. But I still refuse to pay the ridiculous publisher set price for his books, which I read through other (legal) means.

These books are biographies and prices tend to be higher. Grant is 1100 pages long and is written by a Pulitzer Prize winner. His books are probably one of the best researched and authoritative in the field. Leonardo is written by the author who also wrote Steve Jobs and Einstein. This one is only 600 pages but it's said he reviewed thousands of documents written by da Vinci himself ... in Italian using mirror image cursive.

Whether they are worth the price offered each must decide but I wouldn't expect these to be a $0.99 daily deal anytime soon.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by Fbone

These books are biographies and prices tend to be higher. Grant is 1100 pages long and is written by a Pulitzer Prize winner. His books are probably one of the best researched and authoritative in the field. Leonardo is written by the author who also wrote Steve Jobs and Einstein. This one is only 600 pages but it's said he reviewed thousands of documents written by da Vinci himself ... in Italian using mirror image cursive.

Whether they are worth the price offered each must decide but I wouldn't expect these to be a $0.99 daily deal anytime soon.

Thanks. Point taken. Since I tend to read mainly (but not exclusively) fiction my comments tend to focus on fiction without explicitly saying so. What I would call serious non-fiction (from which I exclude self-help books, celebrity biographies and the like) is in a somewhat different position to the market for fiction. I don't pretend to be entirely sure how this segment of the market has been changed by self-publishing, at least so far. Certainly not as radically as the market for fiction has been changed.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

Thanks. Point taken. Since I tend to read mainly (but not exclusively) fiction my comments tend to focus on fiction without explicitly saying so. What I would call serious non-fiction (from which I exclude self-help books, celebrity biographies and the like) is in a somewhat different position to the market for fiction. I don't pretend to be entirely sure how this segment of the market has been changed by self-publishing, at least so far. Certainly not as radically as the market for fiction has been changed.

Books, music and movies are alike in that the blockbusters tend to carry the industry. Where most of the "ebook sales down 17% from last year" miss the boat (other than the obvious, it's all estimated numbers since no one releases actual sales figures) is that book sells year over year tend to be driven by big sellers, so you have to look at what the big sellers are, to make sure it's an apple to apple comparison.

To a great extent, that is also true in the fiction world. Discover-ability rules. You aren't going to sell jack if no one knows the book exists. Certainly, there is a group of readers, such as yourself, who are more focused on price than author, but name authors still tend to drive sells. It's not that different from grocery stores where some people buy generics, but most tend to buy name brands.

The book price model (hardback for a year, followed by paper) has been a fairly successful price model from the stand point of maximizing profit, which is generally what people tend to want to do. It's worked pretty well over the last 50 years.

We are currently seeing an experiment of the subscription model for ebooks verses the sales model. We are also seeing an interesting experiment in ebook prices, as various authors release their books as ebooks at various prices points. Sutherland's price point of $5 is a lot closer to the publisher backlist price points than some of the earlier $1 price point. This is what I tend to expect, the market moving to a price point that maximizes the profit. It's also getting pretty close to the publisher price point ($8 ) for mid-tier authors.

[pwalker8]

On a separate note -
Finding real numbers are very difficult. Earlier this year, I noticed one of John Scalzi's blog post on estimates verse real numbers. In that he said that he tracked the estimated sales (from Bookscan) of his book, Locked-In, and compared it to the real sales figures. Bookscan estimated that he sold 12.7% of what he actually sold. Bookscan estimated that he had sold 11,175 hardcover (love how they try to make it look a lot more precise than it is), when he actually sole 22,500 copies (rounded to the nearest 100). When you add in ebooks and audiobooks, he sold 87.500 copies. This is why I tend to express extreme skepticism about such estimated numbers.

[darryl]

@pwalker. Some interesting points. The book price model continues to be reasonably effective and certainly not an irrational approach if your priority is to preserve your profitable print book market. Time will tell how long it remains a viable pricing strategy, as it is now facing competitive pressure from a number of sources. I don't think it is going to become unviable overnight, but I do think it is on a slow decline. Back in post #183 you wrote:

I just bought book 5 of J.A. Sutherland's Alexis Carew series. Kindle price, either $5 or free if you have kindleunlimited. The paperback price is $18. Sutherland is an indie author and the paper version is via Amazon's Publishing Platform. I would predict that he's not going to sell many paper copies.

I suspect that had the Big 5 been pricing those books the ebook price would have been set at the same price as the paperback, or only a few dollars cheaper. This represents a very good comparison of pricing an ebook to protect print sales and pricing an ebook to maximise ebook revenue. The use of the time tested Book Price Model means that the Big 5 simply do not try to compete with Indie ebook prices. This seems to apply not only to new releases but also to many backlist titles. So long as they are compensated for this in paper sales and by the high prices a significant minority of ebook readers are prepared to pay, this model continues to work. Supplemented with the occasional specials and on at least some books permanent price reductions, the model continues to work, little though I like to see it. Of course, the following factors can affect the longer term viability of this pricing model, and I expect most or even all of them will:

1. Increasing market share of ebooks;
2. Increasing popularity of subscription services;
3. Decreasing importance of bestsellers;
4. Existing blockbuster authors reaching the end of their careers;
5. The need to attract successful Indie authors to traditional publishing and to offer much improved contract terms.

I will not elaborate on the above in this post save for 5. I actually believe there is a real conflict of interest between a traditional publisher and an author where the traditional publisher wishes to price ebooks at a level that seeks to preserve print book sales. The author is receiving only a very small amount from each print book sale, if anything, and in many cases would likely be better off selling more ebooks, depending of course on their contracts.

I agree with your scepticism on all figures. Given the overriding secrecy which pervades the industry, there are few hard figures and pretty well everything is an estimate. It is good that authors like Scalzi are prepared to share their actual figures. I believe Author Earnings rely on such sharing form some authors to validate their assumptions, though of course they are still assumptions and the report a collection of estimates. There is no definitive data available.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

@pwalker. Some interesting points. The book price model continues to be reasonably effective and certainly not an irrational approach if your priority is to preserve your profitable print book market. Time will tell how long it remains a viable pricing strategy, as it is now facing competitive pressure from a number of sources. I don't think it is going to become unviable overnight, but I do think it is on a slow decline. Back in post #183 you wrote:



I suspect that had the Big 5 been pricing those books the ebook price would have been set at the same price as the paperback, or only a few dollars cheaper. This represents a very good comparison of pricing an ebook to protect print sales and pricing an ebook to maximise ebook revenue. The use of the time tested Book Price Model means that the Big 5 simply do not try to compete with Indie ebook prices. This seems to apply not only to new releases but also to many backlist titles. So long as they are compensated for this in paper sales and by the high prices a significant minority of ebook readers are prepared to pay, this model continues to work. Supplemented with the occasional specials and on at least some books permanent price reductions, the model continues to work, little though I like to see it. Of course, the following factors can affect the longer term viability of this pricing model, and I expect most or even all of them will:

1. Increasing market share of ebooks;
2. Increasing popularity of subscription services;
3. Decreasing importance of bestsellers;
4. Existing blockbuster authors reaching the end of their careers;
5. The need to attract successful Indie authors to traditional publishing and to offer much improved contract terms.

I will not elaborate on the above in this post save for 5. I actually believe there is a real conflict of interest between a traditional publisher and an author where the traditional publisher wishes to price ebooks at a level that seeks to preserve print book sales. The author is receiving only a very small amount from each print book sale, if anything, and in many cases would likely be better off selling more ebooks, depending of course on their contracts.

I agree with your scepticism on all figures. Given the overriding secrecy which pervades the industry, there are few hard figures and pretty well everything is an estimate. It is good that authors like Scalzi are prepared to share their actual figures. I believe Author Earnings rely on such sharing form some authors to validate their assumptions, though of course they are still assumptions and the report a collection of estimates. There is no definitive data available.

For the most part, ebook prices tend to be a few dollars less than the paper price. If Sutherland had been with a regular publisher, the paper price would have been more in line with the market, i.e. around $8 or so. I really don't see where that is pricing to protect print sales. As I mentioned, prices for name indie writers, i.e. indie writers who have established themselves enough to have a following, is creeping up much closer to the main line publisher ebook prices. I just double checked several indie writers that I read (i.e. using Amazon as the publisher for both ebook and paper) and they are all right about the same price point for ebooks and paper, i.e. $6 for ebook, $15 for paper. That's a pretty strong indication of where the market is actually heading.

I will say that the churn out a new book every few months school of indies tends to use a different price point.

I think that traditional publishers try to attract any author who will sell books. That does include the more successful indies, but on the flip side, we also see name authors who use indie publishing for their more experimental works, or novelettes that in an earlier time would have been snarfed up by magazines. Both Correa and Butcher have gone that route.

Right now, it seems that we have paper, ebook and audiobook as the three major formats for new books. Scalzi's break down seems to indicate that he's selling a lot more audio books than the other two formats. Of course, he's also using top audio talent with his books.

Right now, I haven't really seen anything that makes me think that we are going to see a big increase in ebook market share in the near future. We are roughly 10 years in to ebooks going main stream with the kindle. Pretty much every new book comes out in ebook format, and it's been that way for a good 4 or 5 years at least. For the most part, the major shifts in the paper market seem to have settled down.

[harriska2]

Originally Posted by cfrizz

The last report from Data Guy showed that a great number of people have simply changed their reading habits.

Amazon has the bulk of them, and a good many fiction readers are now buying/reading self published books for reasonable prices.

For the authors that are with the big publishers, I put myself on the waitlist of my library and continue reading until I get notification of the book has been made available for me.

I'm reading now more than ever before, but I'm NOT buying from the BPH!. I'm sure this is true for many people.

Yep, I buy my self published Oregon authors for $3-$8. Then I get the big names from my library’s overdrive.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by harriska2

Yep, I buy my self published Oregon authors for $3-$8. Then I get the big names from my library’s overdrive.

Yep. That's basically the way I'm going also. I've bought into eBooks, but not at near paperback prices. There should be a wider separation between the price for a book that can be held in your hands (and is more expensive to produce and ship) and one that costs the same to produce one copy as it does to produce a million copies. I'm not surprised that eBook sales are dropping -- if you're going to pay $15 to $20 for a novel it might as well be in a format you can hold and pass on to someone else. Greed is working against the Big 5.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Yep. That's basically the way I'm going also. I've bought into eBooks, but not at near paperback prices. There should be a wider separation between the price for a book that can be held in your hands (and is more expensive to produce and ship) and one that costs the same to produce one copy as it does to produce a million copies. I'm not surprised that eBook sales are dropping -- if you're going to pay $15 to $20 for a novel it might as well be in a format you can hold and pass on to someone else. Greed is working against the Big 5.

Kind of funny how, no matter how much it's pointed out that the actual printing price is only a small fraction of the cost to produce the book, people simply won't accept it. If you have some price threshold you won't go over, that's fine. Many people do. But it really has nothing to do with the actual cost of producing and distributing an ebook verses a paper book.

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Kind of funny how, no matter how much it's pointed out that the actual printing price is only a small fraction of the cost to produce the book, people simply won't accept it. If you have some price threshold you won't go over, that's fine. Many people do. But it really has nothing to do with the actual cost of producing and distributing an ebook verses a paper book.

It's because for YEARS the publishers hammered that the paper prices were going up so they had to raise the price of books.

Greg

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Kind of funny how, no matter how much it's pointed out that the actual printing price is only a small fraction of the cost to produce the book, people simply won't accept it. If you have some price threshold you won't go over, that's fine. Many people do. But it really has nothing to do with the actual cost of producing and distributing an ebook verses a paper book.

Kind of funny how even though we are told that the actual printing price is only a small fraction of the cost to produce a book, a trade paperback tends to cost double or more than the exact same book as a mass market paperback.

This street runs both ways.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Yep. That's basically the way I'm going also. I've bought into eBooks, but not at near paperback prices. There should be a wider separation between the price for a book that can be held in your hands (and is more expensive to produce and ship) and one that costs the same to produce one copy as it does to produce a million copies. I'm not surprised that eBook sales are dropping -- if you're going to pay $15 to $20 for a novel it might as well be in a format you can hold and pass on to someone else. Greed is working against the Big 5.

I don't mind newer books being at/near paper book prices. They have to strike while the iron is hot after all.

It's backlist (fiction) books being sold for +$8.00 that keeps me from buying.

[PeterT]

What annoys me about ebook pricing vs paperback is that a paperback I can sell, or lend to friends; an ebook is mine and only mine.