A Penny for Your Books
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like a lot? Is that maybe the source of the industry? Supply is overwhelmingly high. I know this model is the same for Hollywood and VCs, but wow. I can't imagine if 300,000 movies were released on DVD every year.
Isn't it amazing? And about that rate has been sustained for decades, as well. Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of books being published every year for decades? Who's writing them? How is this economicly sustainable? (If it's not, do we really need to incentivize publication with ever longer copyright?) This is why when Google Books tried to estimate how many books had ever been published, they got a lower bound of 129 million and no real idea how much off they might be.
And it's not just books, either. There's maybe 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+. The number of feature films keeps going up (4000 a year not terribly long ago). The TV industry is feeling shellshocked by just how many programs are in production now. And all these numbers seem like they must be undercounts because who is really able to track how many new songs get uploaded to Youtube every day by professionals, amateurs, and all sorts of indescribable people? And in the rest of the world like China?
Even assuming a lifetime is 100 years, that would be only 10 million albums. There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion in a lifetime.
I think a lot of albums don't take much effort to produce, EPs from garage bands and bedroom turntablists probably require less effort than even a trashy novel. Of course a decent number of those 300,000 new books are very low-effort affairs as well.
Sorry, I left out that part of Kelly's estimate of 1b songs is that album rates will also continue to increase at the historical rate. It seems improbable to me that we could really hit 1.1b songs by 2060 (it's such a mindboggling number), but on the other hand, the world keeps getting wealthier, making music keeps getting cheaper, and the appetite and dreams of people for making music seems to know no limits...
> A “penny book” is something of a misnomer. Used books sold on Amazon typically carry a $3.99 shipping fee. But that isn’t a reflection of the actual cost of shipping them — it’s a function of the company’s rules, which mandate a consistent shipping cost for every category of the product in the Marketplace. Amazon takes a standard cut of every book sold — $1.35 — which leaves each of the penny sellers of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” with a whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item, shipping and handling, labor, rent on warehouses and all the other costs that come up along the way.
At least they've gotten better about showing the full price with shipping in the comparison page, but that only mitigates the issue.
Of course it would be more logical for Amazon to mandate S+H of $0 so that what you see is what you pay, but I think the current system is a reasonable compromise.
And they're still doing that, only now they're not merely incentivized to do so, but required.
$.01 is the cost of the book and Amazon charges the customer $3.99 to cover shipping and handling?
Though I guess enough people are buying them to make it worthwhile to sell them.
I was disappointed but continued searching for a better solution. I'm in the process of writing an article about this search but I can reveal that so far Half.com has been the most affordable at $1.89 shipping for most books. It seems that shipping cost per book is unavoidable but I'm glad these gigantic sorting operations like Thriftbooks are around to repurpose stuff that'd otherwise be decomposing in a landfill.
With regards to pricing the actual books, I wonder what kind of info is out there when it comes to the same book costing $1 or $.01, which is more likely to sell. For non-trade paperbacks I'd say my upper limit per book is $5, but I feel just as ready to buy a good book for $1 as I would for $.01 (and in some cases having the price so low gives me a second thought that I might want to avoid purchasing said book because it might be in awful condition compared to one at $1). I wouldn't mind if these sellers ended up with 75 cents of my money rather than 7 cents per book.