Kindle Books Now 35% Of Sales When Kindle Version Available | Hacker News Reader

Kindle Books Now 35% Of Sales When Kindle Version Available

businessinsider.com

31 pointsmjfern12 comments

This is interesting, and I'm a big fan of the Kindle, but I think the statistic somewhat overstates things, because there's a bias in the data: when someone has a Kindle, they're going to purchase ALL of their kindle material from the 200,000 items that are available for the kindle. When someone doesn't have a kindle, they draw their reading material from the long tail.

Imagine that there were just 10 titles available for the Kindle - I bet that 70 to 90% of all copies sold of those titles would be kindle titles.

Even if those ten titles are at the top of the NYT best-seller list? There should be a limit to how many sales are attributable to the Kindle version, which would keep the percentages lower.

It would be nice to see the unit sales percentages for books with a Kindle version, instead of averaging the percentage across all books - that would weight it more toward the high-volume titles.

Plus, those are 35% of Amazon's sales of those books. If you have a Kindle, you are defintely buying from Amazon; if you're buying paper books, Amazon is just one of your suppliers.

I actually suspect that the majority of those are incremental sales (to use the article's terminology, where "incremental" means ebook sales which aren't cannibalizing book sales). I suspect this based just on my own anecdotal experience, but in the absence of hard data that might be the best we can do.

Since getting my Kindle 2 under two months ago, I've bought seven ebooks (and besides those seven I've also downloaded five more that were offered for free, usually the first books of multi-part series, but I presume that they're counting these as part of "sales").

All of those are non-technical books. Prior to my Kindle 2, I bought maybe one new book every few months, always a technical book. Non-technical books I would usually buy used (with shipping costs, often around the same price as a new Kindle ebook, but much more convenient), and only maybe one or two a month.

One of the huge reasons has been that it is now far more convenient to read samples. Amazon has always let you read the first chapter or so of lots of its books, but I've never really used this feature because it would be uncomfortable to read these samples on my computer and because when I'm browsing Amazon my mind is in web-browsing mode, which means I'm multitasking and interacting heavily and am uninterested in even reading blog posts that are too long, let alone chapters of books.

You are also not allowed to add a Kindle book to your Amazon wishlist. At first I thought this was immensely frustrating. At first, I thought they put this in place because you can't yet buy a kindle book for another kindle owner as a gift, but what I use my wishlist for is to keep track of all the interesting books I hear about and want to investigate later. Without a wishlist, what I started doing instead is sending the free sample of the book to my Kindle. I have now amassed dozens of free first chapters on my Kindle, and of course when I reach the end of each one, it's only a couple button presses to buy the full ebook.

Interesting, notwithstanding the questionable statistical methodologies.

Asking HN: do you think e-books are overpriced? Several writers I know say that at most they get the same royalty on a Kindle copy as on paper - or sometimes less; the excuse being that the whole book has to be re-typeset for Kindle etc. While arguably valid for some books with complex layout, I find it very hard to credit for things like novels etc. I sometimes take old public domain books in .txt form from Project Gutenberg, reformat into more readable font etc. and output a .pdf for printing or laptop reading. This rarely takes more than an hour or two, and indeed many public domain or obscure books are available from Kindle for $0.80.

So I wonder where the money is going when an e-book sells for $9.99 and the author informs me he's still getting the same ~$0.50 per copy.

You'll probably like http://manybooks.net

The site's maintainer also designs very interesting covers for many of the available texts; the gallery alone is worth a visit: http://manybooks.net/personal_covers.php

I've always thought that ebooks shouldn't cost more than 99cts. Perhaps 4.99 for a hot best seller like Harry Potter or something. But paying 10s, 20s or more is just ridiculous.

One word: GREED

Well, then you might argue that the entire book industry, especially the text book industry is motivated by greed.

For example, I was able to buy a technical book which retails for $49 on my Kindle for only $8. Not 99 cents, but it still saved me a lot of money.

http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Methods-Scientific-Computing...

"Young Madison spends a typical day visiting with friends and family; follow along to see how she is learning ever step of the way! This book invites readers to explore the world of learning through the eyes of a child. Find out how children learn in a variety of different ways as they explore all that is around them. Discover how learning can occur while baking cookies or while jumping rope with friends."

Looks like numerical methods are easier than I expected!

That is not a problem with kindle, but with author's contracts. As far as I know, most of the time they are paid in advance, and the 0.5 cents are just extra.

What would be really cool is if Amazon would let authors publish through them directly on kindle. This will probably happen at some point, when the market in e-readers becomes substantial, though it may not be Amazon who does it. But for the time being that would upset the publishers too much to be worth it (for Amazon at least). And when it does happen, be prepared to witness RIAA vs Napster all over again. They will do anything to keep this from happening, including banning for life any authors who publish directly on an e-medium. Just remember the recent "read-out-loud" incident with Kindle...

How the hell did this get modded up? Notice this quote: "If that's even close to accurate, it's hard to overstate the importance of it." But we have no objective way of gauging its accuracy, and this quote definitely doesn't pass the smell test.

I'm still holding back, in large part because most of the books I read tend to be non-mainstream, while the stuff on Kindle so far is largely new releases, etc.

That will probably change at some point.

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