Article

2012-07-20 Home Front: Culture Wars

E-books outsold hardcover books in 2011

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by badanov 2012-07-20 00:00|| || Front Page|| [1 views ] Top

#1 I can vouch for that: I have six volumes of historical fiction out there, all available as print and e-book format. The ebook sales have been gradually creeping up all this year, and when I got an Instalaunch late in May, sales of the print editions barely hiccupped ... but sales of ebooks quadrupled at once. A lot of people have gotten into the e-readers this year, for the convenience of carrying around one slim little reader with dozens of books on it. They have become much less expensive, and I think that one reason that older people (unexpectedly!) like them is that the font size can be made larger, and the high-end ones have a text-to-speech function, which is very handy for people with visual impairments.

Posted by Sgt. Mom 2012-07-20 08:46|| http://www.celiahayes.com 2012-07-20 08:46|| Front Page Top

#2 The content still way overpriced. When they drop the price of text, the volume will explode.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2012-07-20 08:54|| 2012-07-20 08:54|| Front Page Top

#3 E-book content from the major players in the literary-industrial complex is way overpriced, Nimble. We kicked around the topic of pricing our own ebooks a couple of years ago, in the indy-authors group that I belong to, and pretty much agreed that $3-5 was the sweet spot, and .99 was way undervaluing the writer's time and effort, unless it was for a novella. (Although a lot of writers have broken into the big time by selling in volume at that price.)
The big-name publishers trying to charge close to the same price for an ebook as they would for a paperback edition were essentially pricing themselves out of the market. There are no printing costs involved with an ebook, no warehouse costs, no transportation costs, no retail costs ... but the mainline publishers are still coasting along under the old paradigm.
We indys figured that pricing our books at about the same as a cup of good gourmet coffee would be a was for us to enter into the market. A reader who would take a chance on one of our books wouldn't be out that much if they didn't like it. And if they did like it ... well, then they'd look at our other books, and shazam, ka-ching, we have a loyal fan.
I suspect a lot of the increase in ebook sales was for ebooks at less than $5. When Big Publishing bites the bullet and lets go of old habits, they might well catch up to where the indys have been going all this time.

Posted by Sgt. Mom 2012-07-20 10:20|| http://www.celiahayes.com 2012-07-20 10:20|| Front Page Top

#4 Sgt Mom, agreed. $3 is clearly a sweet spot for Kindle books.

PS: bought your trilogy, now just need time to read them.

Posted by Steve White 2012-07-20 14:11|| 2012-07-20 14:11|| Front Page Top

#5 As I understand it, the cost of the physical book is surprisingly small. The larger portion of the publisher's expense is marketing and administrative bloat, starting with being located in New York.

I agree that $3-5 is a fair price for the whole book, but I expect to see prices of $0.99 for parts. If you pay that little you won't mind paying it to find out if you are interested. And if you are interested, you won't mind paying the same amount to get the next two or three parts. Weren't Dickens' novels all serialized?

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2012-07-20 14:26|| 2012-07-20 14:26|| Front Page Top

#6 Thanks, Steve - when you have the time, I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy. And I hardly had to make anything up ... well, maybe the bit about Christmas Eve and the provost marshal. And the local resistance during the Civil War ... that last is just my informed guess.

Posted by Sgt. Mom 2012-07-20 16:24|| http://www.celiahayes.com 2012-07-20 16:24|| Front Page Top

#7 Nimble: I worked one summer selling Collier's Encyclopedia door to door (hey, it was the recession of '74 and there were NO jobs otherwise). I learned then just how cheap it was to print books; the expense was all the work required to get the books ready for printing.

Dickens: yes, most were serialized, and he was a master of it. Unlike other writers at the time who would write the entire book and then have it serialized a chapter at a time, Dickens wrote on the fly -- thus he had the ability to change his plot, characters, etc in response to feedback from his readers (and he did, and he clearly was interested in what his readers had to say).

He was also one of the first authors of that time to commission artwork to run with the serialized work. To that point the publishers had commissioned the work when it suited them, and the art was generally pretty bland. Dickens insisted on sitting with the artists to tell them what he wanted, and the artists in turn worked to his specifications. The result was more sharply drawn scenes that looked the way Dickens wanted them to look.

Posted by Steve White 2012-07-20 17:23|| 2012-07-20 17:23|| Front Page Top

#8 He would have loved on line publishing.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2012-07-20 17:38|| 2012-07-20 17:38|| Front Page Top

23:28 Raider
22:12 Thing From Snowy Mountain
21:38 JosephMendiola
21:35 Zhang Fei
21:29 JosephMendiola
21:28 Jan
21:11 Frank G
21:10 Crons Guelph6468
21:10 Zhang Fei
21:00 Dale
20:42 Rjschwarz
20:14 rammer
20:01 Chuter Uluse1520
19:57 Chuter Uluse1520
19:57 Shavirt Johnson4292
19:53 rammer
19:53 Chuter Uluse1520
19:48 DepotGuy
19:42 Zhang Fei
19:29 Zhang Fei
19:20 Rupert Jones5861
18:57 Pappy
18:56 Zhang Fei
18:37 Capsu78