Blog “Black Plastic Glasses” responds to the following quote: “The growth in e-book sales in genres such as romance and science-fiction is leading to a cannibalisation in sales of printed books, according to Nielsen BookScan data.”
Start of response: I posit a slightly more nuanced definition of what is happening: Ebooks aren’t cannibalizing print books — consumers with ebook reading devices are, as a rule, no longer buying print books. Subtle? Yes, but from a commercial publishing point of view this is a crucial difference between seeing a direct correlation between ebooks and print books and understanding what happens to a customer when they make the switch to reading devices.
Book
Book mentioned in blog entry: Merchants of Culture
The world of book publishing is going through turbulent times. For nearly five centuries the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but at the dawn of the 21st century the industry finds itself faced with perhaps the greatest challenges since Gutenberg. A combination of economic pressures and technological change is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the book in the digital age.
In this book – the first major study of trade publishing for more than 30 years – Thompson situates the current challenges facing the industry in an historical context, analyzing the transformation of trade publishing in the United States and Britain since the 1960s. He gives a detailed account of how the world of trade publishing really works, dissecting the roles of publishers, agents and booksellers and showing how their practices are shaped by a field that has a distinctive structure and dynamic. Against this backdrop Thompson analyzes the impact of the digital revolution on book publishing and examines the pressures that are reshaping the field of trade publishing today.
It is rather odd that it’s not available as an ebook but
I’d love to know the figures on how many they think they’d get if they had done that from day 1.
I’m wondering if there is a big difference between the sales of ebooks from a non-fiction vs a fiction setting.
I have no doubt that people with Kindles, iPads etc would buy ebooks, but also is the market there for mass buying of such books? I would have thought that the demand for some books in either format is rather limiting depending on it’s subject.
Anyway, the only problem I can see is if the business is split off into totally different operations so that the decay of sales for print could bring down that company and cause problems overal. If the business is all integrated does it really matter as long as the book is sold somewhere?
Book format wars?
It is truly refreshing to read some common sense reflections about e-books and e-book readers. It still suprises me that so many reactions to e-books are knee-jerk, e.g., your aren’t going to take my books away, you can’t bring an ebook to the beach or in the bathtub, you can’t “snuggle” with it, etc. Some of these type reactions sound more in defense of a significant other rather than a collection of pages! And as far as ebooks replacing print books, last time I checked radio was still around – wasn’t it supposed to be replaced by TV? To me the below quote (from the Black Plastic Glasses blog author) is the key to e-books success:
“In fact with the Kindle platform, I can read on my MacBook Pro, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, or Blackberry. I read on these devices when I have spare moments, when I travel, when I am in the doctor’s office waiting room, when I don’t want to think about work for 30 minutes and I want to escape. And since they all synchronize to the cloud, I am always exactly where I left off on any device I want to use.”
Don’t knock something until you try it.