WSJ: E-Book Sales Fall After New Amazon Contracts

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by tompe

Exactly. Strange that people here do not seem to understand this.

I think there are two classes of buyer here. There is the occasional reader who needs any old book to read on the airplane or at the beach. That kind of reader may pick up any latest bestseller, like a Patterson book, and may buy a few per year as needed. Then there are those who only buy a book to be part of a cultural event, and it's only books like "50 Shades of Gray", or "The DaVinci Code", or some similar phenomenal bestseller. For the latter class, there is no substitute for the book they want, and they only buy one every year or two when some book is all the rage among non-readers.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Doubt it. Maybe to get the numbered list, but searches itself priotize bestsellers first. Amazon even conveniently let you see "what customers also bought" - and not just for books. It will be a cold day in hell when I run out of good books to read in KU. But but there is more junk in KU. Don't start with that argument - there is just as much junk with the BPH.

I was just commenting on your how hard it is to find best sellers.
Funny thing is I didn't like KU as a reader.
I know about the customers also bought at Amazon. I do use that feature sometimes.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by darryl

Or do you think that the way Fictionwise was treated by the Big Publishers under Agency was a good thing?

I doubt Fictionwise was specifically targeted, by publishers, for destruction. With that caveat, I'm going to answer yes to your question.

On March 5, 2009, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise for $15.7 million.

On October 9, 2009, the Nook was announced (or at least leaked to the Wall Street Journal), with sales beginning in late November.

Steve Jobs' incriminating draft email, regarding agency, was written on January 14, 2010.

Agency began on January 28, 2010.

On February 21, 2014, Kobo stated that, without agency, it will lose market share to E-book Retailers who are willing to consistently price their E-books at unsustainably low levels that other competitors simply cannot meet.

What does this time line tell us about Fictionwise's future in an alternative America of unbridled eBook price competition?

The publishers weren't doing something to damage Fictionwise. Fictionwise was already a part -- a small part -- of Barnes & Noble, and was competing with its parent while, it's highly likely, losing it money from day one of acquisition.

There's nothing the publishers could have done to save Fictionwise in a low price war against Amazon and it's own parent, Barnes & Noble.

As for retail price maintenance in books AKA agency, it seems to do a good job of limiting consolidation of book stores in France and Germany, where it is legally mandated, and where two of the big five are headquartered. And in the US, where I can find just about anything I want to read at a public library, and book publishers remain more financially healthy than newspapers and magazine publishers, it seems to me at least as good an idea.

If you want to blame someone for the demise of Fictionwise, Barnes & Noble seems to me a more plausible punching bag than the publishers. See:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...1&postcount=12

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

I was just commenting on your how hard it is to find best sellers.

Are you kidding me? If you want to find a bestseller (as reader) all you have to do is use some minor Google-FU. That BPH have a harder time finding good (not merely hyped up) bestsellers is not the lack of worthy books, but the lack of monopoly on books in general. Used to be as little as five years ago that the BPH had a monopoly on books. Not anymore.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Are you kidding me? If you want to find a bestseller (as reader) all you have to do is use some minor Google-FU. That BPH have a harder time finding good (not merely hyped up) bestsellers is not the lack of worthy books, but the lack of monopoly on books in general. Used to be as little as five years ago that the BPH had a monopoly on books. Not anymore.

You said you had to go out of your way to find bestsellers. So yes I was kind of teasing. Was not being serious. Sorry if we had a misunderstanding.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by tompe

Bullshit. What evidence do you have for this very strange opinion?

I suspect that the evidence for my strange opinion is about the same as the evidence for your strange opinion.

[darryl]

Steve. It may well be that Fictionwise was doomed, at least from the time it was acquired by Barnes and Noble. We will probably never know for sure. But certainly any realistic chance for them went out the Window when agency emasculated their business model. As you are no doubt aware from my posts I do not normally have a lot of sympathy for companies that fail to adapt to change. However, when the change is a conspiracy to raise prices I make an exception.

Retail Prince Maintenance is wonderful if your priority is saving now mostly archaic businesses at the expense of the consumer. I too liked my bookshops, but sadly, like the Horse and Buggy, they have mostly had their day.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

book publishers remain more financially healthy than newspapers and magazine publishers

That is a given. Newspaper and magazine has the big disadvantage of being incapable of cashing in on older issues. Thereas the gigantic backlist with virtually never ending copyright keeps book publishers financially healthier. Doesn't mean at all that they are adapting any better. There is huge potential to cash in on the backlist, but the publishers remain stubborn in changing their ways. The newfangled ebooks are not simply going to blow over and the publishers merely need to wait it out to go back to business as it used to be. How they still think it should be.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Actually that is what almost every self-published author or small publisher gives Amazon.

The split I was speaking of was in your logic. You are suddenly deciding that people who drop to $0.99 prices would suddenly get over twice the percentage of the sales price as their share.

What, did you think I was saying 65%-30% split between vendors and authors?

Sentence context.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Gym users still do it to save money. And they only pay a flat fee per month if they use the gym multiple times a week. If you only go swimming (in the gyms that have an indoor pool) once a week it is cheaper to pay the at the gate single time admission for non-subscribers each week.

Ok, not Gym users, Gym subscription holders, there seems to be lots of people who belong to a Gym but don't actually go

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by rkomar

I think there are two classes of buyer here. There is the occasional reader who needs any old book to read on the airplane or at the beach. That kind of reader may pick up any latest bestseller, like a Patterson book, and may buy a few per year as needed. Then there are those who only buy a book to be part of a cultural event, and it's only books like "50 Shades of Gray", or "The DaVinci Code", or some similar phenomenal bestseller. For the latter class, there is no substitute for the book they want, and they only buy one every year or two when some book is all the rage among non-readers.

Actually those occasional readers will read whatever is the popular book of the month and will neither know nor care if it's indie or tradpub. Essentially, if you can get the book in paper form into supermarkets and airports, whichever book is best (or given your examples, least worst ) will become the rage. If you give it a bit of a marketing push or it's by an author that people have found unobjectionable before then all the better.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Ok, not Gym users, Gym subscription holders, there seems to be lots of people who belong to a Gym but don't actually go

That is why the gym subscription model works: the people who *intend* to use the subscription religiously but can't find the time.

Book subscriptions are different in that there are far fewer people thinking "I need to read more". People either are readers (and find ways to feed the habit via libraries and used books and free ebooks if the budget won't allow more) or they aren't. And few people in the second category feel guilty about it. That puts pressure on the "all you can read" subscription services because the subscribers they get can read a lot.

And because KU is mostly Indie and small tradpub, that makes the other services attractive mostly to BPH-focused heavy readers. Which, on top of their payout model, makes them look more like a VC-to-BPH funding channel than a survival business.

I'm actually impressed they've lasted this long.
Though I suspect it might be due more to a shortage of subscribers than business model robustness.

Anyway, back to the matter of BPH ebook revenues: subscriptions are a discount channel for the BPHs so even if their partner subscription services prosper, they'll be substituting high priced sales with lower payout rentals with little attendant boost to visibility ala KU. That's why I think viable subscription services need to be tied to a bigger ebook retailer.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Actually those occasional readers will read whatever is the popular book of the month and will neither know nor care if it's indie or tradpub. Essentially, if you can get the book in paper form into supermarkets and airports, whichever book is best (or given your examples, least worst ) will become the rage. If you give it a bit of a marketing push or it's by an author that people have found unobjectionable before then all the better.

And those casual readers will most likely buy print at Walmart or Costco than an ebook from Kobo. If they even know Kobo exists.

All this talk about "casual readers" will save the BPHs keeps glossing over that casual readers are pbook buyers not ebook buyers. They don't care if ebooks are cheap or expensive. And, ebooks or no ebooks, they are not buying more books now than they were ten years ago. A lot of casual reader book buying is holiday season book gifting and that habit is fading.

That is not a growth market. It hasn't been, for a decade or more.
It will not make up for losses among heavy book readers who have adopted ebooks and are not going back to print no matter what.

The behavior of the two customer types are not the same and using one to project onto the other is not safe.

Now, there *is* a third class of reader that might switch from ebook to print book but it is, revenue-wise, the smallest market of all. True fans. These are people who buy a few titles a year from the same authors, religiously, and don't buy much of anything else. They're not bandwagon readers: they don't jump on whatever trendy book might be hyped. They're not adventurous or willing to try new stuff. They just want their regular fixes of Patterson, King, Grafton, or whatever.

Those folks are price insensitive for sure.
But even within a brand name author's following, those are few compared to the total market. Again, extrapolating from true fans to regular followers is a dangerous business practice. Most buyers *are* price sensitive. The threshold varies from person to person but everybody has their threshold. For some it is $10, for others it is $5 or $15. But everybody has one.
The people desperate enough to pay $50 for the latest King can probably be counted on one hand even if those willing to pay $30 is significant. But that is just for King. The market at large is not made up of loyal fans, much less True Fans.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

The split I was speaking of was in your logic. You are suddenly deciding that people who drop to $0.99 prices would suddenly get over twice the percentage of the sales price as their share.

What, did you think I was saying 65%-30% split between vendors and authors?

Sentence context.

Someone way up thread said that Amazon didn't like 99 cent books. It took me two days but I finally figured out how to show Amazon makes a bigger profit off that split.
I might have been off on my "selling twice as many 99 cent books", if the voracious readers I know are any indication, they probably sell 4 to 5 times as many.
So that was just an example.


Now as to the book buyers,
My mother buys one or two books a year by very certain authors. She also buys a few textbooks since she is going to college. She is a senior senior.
Me on the other hand buy 1 to 2 books a week, not counting freebies. I buy on sale.

[DiapDealer]

I buy 50-60 books a year (which equals about how much I read in a year, BTW). I buy a book when I'm ready to read that book. Whether it's the latest from a favorite author, or something from an author who's vying to be one of my favorites. If those books happen to be on sale--so be it. But I don't go looking for discounts. Mostly because I rarely buy them in advance of being ready to read them.

Ebooks have completely converted me into employing a JIT inventory technique. My "shopping for books" consists of online perusing and then adding ones that interest me to a virtual TBR list--with no consideration whatsoever for price at that time. When I look through my virtual list and decide it's time to read a certain book. I buy it and do so. If that ebook is creeping into the $18 range and beyond; it better be by one of my favorite authors. But I'm cool with taking a chance on an unknown at $10-$16 for a new book if it looks interesting (and the sample chapter doesn't scream "amateur").

I have just enough time to look for interesting books and to read interesting books. I can't spare the time to look for interesting books that also meet an arbitrary price ceiling. That's one too many variables. And I really was told there'd be no math.