Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books
phx.corporate-ir.net
phx.corporate-ir.net
Amazon:
Kindle release: November 19, 2007
Date surpassed: ~May 2011
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Netflix:
Streaming started: Fall/Winter 2008?
Date surpassed: ~November 2010
I wonder how long they were working on streaming before it was released. A lot of planning must have gone into something that beat the company's traditional model in just two years.
The network has come a long way in 12 years.
[I don't want to take anything away from Netflix, I have completely stopped using DVDs since they started streaming movies. They completely rule the online streaming market.]
Next up on the disruption bus: literary agents and book publishers.
No, really.
The one MAJOR cost left to self publishing if you are truly serious is editing, unless you are in a genre where stock image covers won't cut it. Giving up a % of sales revenue for the rest of time for a book considering the limited help they really offer these days is just silly. Dean Wesley Smith has been discussing this on his blog at length over time.
Editors they MIGHT have connections with, but so do a lot of indie authors these days, so if you join those communities you can get good recommendations from fellow writers.
Surely, some, or even many, agents aren't doing particularly great. But that's no different than any other provider of a service. Most may suck, but that doesn't mean the whole category is of questionable benefit.
It's actually a huge positive sign that they're at least recognizing the deficiency and trying to reposition themselves. It means they'll be eager to become even better at the things that writers most-need in the new landscape.
Just because you can do your own dental work doesn't suddenly make it a good idea, much less an economic one. For work that's somewhat specialized and very intermittent in nature (like promoting a new book) it's often better to aggregate the labor.
1) It takes a big infrastructure to manage an eBook store. Amazon has to be able to deliver books at near instantaneous speeds. They have to deliver magazines and newspapers at a scheduled time (time is critical).
2) Amazon provides 3G delivery to (many of) its customers for free. It's not free for Amazon.
3) Amazon already has built up warehousing/delivery infrastructure and must maintain it because their retail business isn't going away. The cost of delivering a single book is not the same as for Barnes & Noble.
2) "free" in the same way your coffee might be "free" with the purchase of a bagel...
3) True, but let's taked away all the fixed costs (and presume the warehouses would have existed anyways, which may or may not be true). There are still plenty of variable costs - storage space costs money, handling costs labour, and shipping cannot be escaped (and is expensive!)...
|Amazon already has built up warehousing/delivery infrastructure and must maintain it Amazon's retail business shows nice year-on-year growth, and probably can eat the extra capacity left by the book business.
Amazon's retail business is expanding, and is currently building new facilities. Storing and shipping fewer books means less new warehouse space they must build.
At least via the KDP, you as the author pay for that in part because it comes out of the price of your book.
Also, running the Kindle store has placed a burden on Amazon it didn't have with dead tree sales. If the Kindle Store is anything like the iOS App Store, free books outsell paid books by 6-to-1 or more. So Amazon has to pay the digital distribution costs for a lot of books that bring in zero revenue. That adds up and can chip away the profit it makes on non-free books.
edit: I'd just like to say, getting down voted when stating facts amuses me to no end.
Unless I'm mistaken, anyone can do just that with Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program. And then can't they set their own price, even free?
Let's assume that Amazon isn't less competent in that area, with their AWS expertise and operating large-scale websites since 1995.
Given than I watch much more than 8 hours of video, it's safe to say that the cost of delivering an hour worth of video is less than $1. In fact, I remember reading (can't find a reference) than it's around 5 cents.
Let's assume that hour of video is 1GB and an eBook is 100kB.
Delivering more than 10 thousand ebooks (which is way more than most everyone will ever buy in their lifetime) probably costs Amazon about 5 cents and certainly well below $1 (even if you choose to nitpick and adjust my numbers).
That means that they need to sell three 99 cent books (at 30% profit) to cover their lifetime costs per customer.
Let's stop this talk about costs of delivering digital goods, and especially ebooks. Ebooks are a fraction of the size of music or video files and people download few ebooks once while they stream audio and video for hours and in case of music repeatedly and radio and video streaming services still manage to make a profit after paying huge royalties.
I could probably personally fund the cost of bandwidth to deliver ebooks for the entire population of the US and still afford a latte.
Delivering the goods is not the only thing that costs them money, and, likely, only a tiny fraction of the costs. Without further arguments one must assume that that DVD more or less has a similar size web page advertising it as a 99c book, that page gets the same number of views for every sale, help desk and accounting costs of a DVD are about equal to those of a 99c ebook, etc.
I do not know how large those costs are, but it might be possible to get an idea from Netflix data, if it is publicly available. How much profit do they make per $8 customer? I bet it isn't $7.95.
I often find myself buying books I want to read in the future simply because it's only $10-$25 and I don't want to forget about them (I never liked the wish lists for whatever reason). Which is easy to do since there's no penalty in space (either disk or physical)
I also find myself buying more from Amazon because I don't have to wait for shipping (and Kindle delivery actually makes getting the book faster than if I drove to the local Barnes and Noble)
So for me the Kindle has shifted my book purchasing to e-books but it has also dramatically increased the amount I spend on books from Amazon.
Would it be that my first statement is true, or are consumers just not aware of this?
It's not "taking away freedoms" if you buy The Catcher in the Rye Kindle Edition vs Print Edition
It's purchasing a completely different thing.
They have the same end, a lot of the time. You end up reading The Catcher in the Rye.
One is cheaper and is easier to travel with, the other you can lend to your friends a lot easier. One dies if batteries die, the other gets warped pages. One can be taken into the bathtub with just a zip-loc bag to protect it, the other runs the risk of getting rippled pages.
So it gives the "freedom" of being able to travel with ~500 books instead of 4, gives the freedom of easier bathtub reading, takes away the freedom of lending to friends, etc.
It is simply a different product.
Obviously I could just use the free copy to begin with but it wouldn't send any information to the people that make such books that I want more of them. Also the QA on such books can be a little light and format shifting them is a hassle I do if need be but would rather avoid.
I've had people (generally older, nontechnical types, but who aren't about to just trust that Amazon will be around forever) ask me whether it's possible to strip the DRM off of Amazon books. They may not know the term "DRM", but they understand it functionally and that it's a disadvantage.
Unfortunately the de-DRMing tools are a little too complex and have too many rough edges for this audience, right now. (Although there's a Mac version that wraps most of the de-DRM scripts for Nook/Kindle/Adobe in a drag-and-drop GUI that is pretty clever.) I hope that developers of those sort of tools will keep ease-of-use by nontechnical people in mind in their development.
Once you have the ability to strip the DRM and put the ebook file away in a safe place, you really have a product that is better in nearly all respects.
I might add that consumers also give up the freedom to cut down trees to make paper, wait for physical delivery, have piles of books clutter up the house and periodically haul them away. I think they actually are aware of these.
On the issue of price, usually kindle is pretty good but so far used books+amazon prime can beat that price.
I own an old version. It's line by line, and accuracy depends on the typeface used, but I have generally loved having mine. (Sorry for the pop-up. It seems the URL will 404 without it.)
So put it in the scanner.
For myself I found an approach which I might finish sometime: Kindle on wine, a small X application that takes a screenshot of the Kindle window, OCRs it via tesseract, and then sends the emulated "right" keypress. The OCR quality was pretty good, of course I'd lose the formatting, but then no need to worry about Next DRM Format.
Just to clarify: all of the above is for purely being able to search/copy, etc. from the contents. I love the auto-sync capabilities to a point that when I see a pdf of some book that interests me, I go and try to buy a kindle version. But the DRM is the most annoying thing since the nail in the shoe :)
For me the biggest deal breaker is that it's not an open platform.
As much as I crave a Kindle, I think I'll wait a bit until the technology matures and more open alternatives surface.
For instance, I've bought no books from Amazon in the past year (very a-typical for me, historically).. but I don't own a Kindle. I've bought some e-books from other outlets for my iPad. So I'm "contributing" to the success Amazon is touting in the release based on the way they're laying it out.
Despite being a supporter of ebooks, owning a Kindle and reading a lot, I still take Amazon's announcement with a whole bag of salt, because even a fistfull isn't enough for the inaccuracy allowed in their statement.
Firstly to all those not-in-the-know, ebooks have solely been cannibalizing the sales of mass market paperbacks, which is why most major publishers are pricing them around the same price point. Why? Because mass market books are no longer paying off the editorial costs, which is the biggest Publisher cost in producing a book as your typical book passes through the hands of 3 editors and often multiple proof readers and the hands of an actual copy editor.
By January 2011 figures from the AAP, total book (hardcover, paperback, ebook, audio-books and audio-ebooks) were down 1.9% over January 2010. Adult Hardbacks fell 11.3%, paperback (note these are generally the paperback versions of books by known authors) fell by 19.7% and mass market paperbacks (IE new authors) fell 30.9%. Children's Hardbacks stayed the status quo at a fall of 1.9%. Children's paperbacks sell 17.7%.
However, given eBook's 116% growth it likely helped skew the total book sale decline. Yet this isn't impressive yet as it attributes only 8.6% of total book sales. I'll be impressed when eBook sales hit what MP3 sales hit this year, which received little publicity - in that MP3 sales this year hit $5.7 billion. Physical sales hit $5.7 billion. IE MP3 has 50% sale share.
It may be a sign of what's to come, but I expect another 5 years before eBook sales even hit the same as mass market paper backs, and that will only be through massive declines in MMPB sale figures. I'd say about 8 years for trade paperbacks (Stephen King and all your lovely crime novelists) to be matched. However, this isn't really going to be a huge game changer as the bigger the market gets the more important marketing becomes. This will mean, the same as it does today, that the vast majority of eBook sales will be coming from the same authors it is today, just in a bigger proportion.
The nice thing is that there's really no penalty to waiting until the very last second to buy the next book, even if you're traveling (unless you're actually on the plane.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-ebook-...
What we're seeing here is a day after day pattern.