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I could spend a lot of time doing research and providing links and spelling out for you just what Amazon is and what they do. Halfway through my research, though, I was scooped — thankfully, as the grinding process was killing me and stalling other writing. Please enjoy the following slideshow presentation made available by faberNovel under a Creative Commons license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Stéphane Distinguin, Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire, faberNovel, May 2011.
I could make all sorts of points about how Amazon.com has made fundamental changes to retail. I can’t say Amazon is bad; I use Amazon myself [mostly for computer stuff. I understandably prefer another source for books, and typically buy my anime DVDs from RightStuf, who rock]. I can’t say Amazon is wrong; obviously in a free market customers can choose whichever retailer or provider of goods & services they like — I might argue that Amazon shouldn’t have been given $3 Billion Dollars and a 7 year grace period without showing a profit, as that seems hardly fair, but in the world of corporate finance and stock market machinations there is no fair – and the ability to sell the concept to investors was at least as important as the ability to sell books through a website.
But Amazon didn’t really make any fundamental changes; it’s just an old business sped up by the internet.
1. The Catalogue
Some have said Amazon has revolutionized bookselling.
Sure. Whatevs. (But I’m a bookseller, you know I’m biased.) Let me cast it this way:
What Amazon did is revive and revolutionize selling books by catalogue, a practice that dates back to at least 1888 — and was lamented by booksellers even at that early date as a practice that was “taking advantage of the confusion between [the] two methods of selling books” and additionally of concern because: “the discount system developed until the nominal or advertised price of books did not correspond to the practical selling price. The result of this has been to decrease not only the number of bookstores in proportion to the community, but probably the actual number of book-stores throughout the country”
Publishers Weekly, January 7, 1888. Matter of public record & in the public domain, available on Google Books and also found [text only, with some typos due to scan interpretation] at Archive.org
Well worth a read, and a good think besides.
##
Amazon is a giant book catalogue.
Actually, that’s kind of a great thing: every book ever, right! Neato!
Yeah, fine, but Amazon is not unique. Every bookstore—and several websites—have bought or built a book catalogue — and Amazon isn’t even unique in putting their catalogue online, as every sales site is basically an online catalogue — and for books, there is even an official arbiter & authority on the matter
In fact, Amazon wasn’t even founded to sell books. “Bezos perused roughly 20 different products, including magazines, CDs, and computer software, that he deemed appropriate for sale on the Internet. Eventually, Bezos decided to pursue books, believing that the electronic searching and organizing capabilities of an online site could help to organize the industry’s sizeable and varied offerings. At the same time, the small size of most books would simplify distribution efforts. Bezos also believed that customers would be more likely to make their first online purchase if the risk was minimal; an inexpensive object like a book might prove less intimidating than something more costly, like computer equipment.” [source]
So even in building the massive book catalogue upon which the initial success of Amazon was based… well… turns out everyone has/had the same database. Pretty simple, in fact. Even with 6 or 8 or 12 million or so titles to worry about [opinions vary as to how many books are still in print] the basic database — Title, Author, Publisher, city and year of publication, and ISBN, will fit on a single disc. (Used to fit on a CD, Bowker sold one in 1986; I think you’d probably need a DVD-R at this point though of course the internet makes that redundant.)
“Ah yes,” I hear you [or at least, an Amazon fan] say, “but Amazon added pictures of the cover, and item descriptions, and user reviews, and the ‘customers who bought this also bought’ feature, and they’re cheaper” etc etc etc.
Amazon compiled all that, yes: but the cover images and item descriptions are provided by the publisher, who wants to sell books through Amazon — it’s not like some intern in the warehouse was scanning covers for 10 straight years (and even the publishers’ interns didn’t have to do it as most covers existed digitally already) (or maybe some poor schlub did have to do this, but it wasn’t on Amazon’s dime)
The “item description” is usually the same as the jacket copy: already written and also, likely already digital.
‘Customers who bought this also bought’ … man, I think even I might figure out how to code this.
And of course the customer reviews.
Written by customers.
Uncompensated customers. And asking for an opinion from the internet is like asking for nitrogen from the atmosphere: Free for whomever figures out how to fix it — even bacteria can do it.
##
SO.
Amazon bought their initial database, plugged in some free publisher info, dressed it up with free content from their own customers [& actually, full props to Amazon for implementing social media years before anyone thought of Myspace or Friendster — let alone Facebook, or “social media” as a term] and ran it for years at a loss.
1995-2002. Seven years. Massive outside investment. No profits.
[…hand me a sweet deal like that and I could probably churn out a multi-billion dollar corporation, too.]
Amazon did have to spend money. Even with free databases and free descriptions and free reviews, someone still had to correlate and compile that mess [and write the software, databases, and user interfaces to make it automatic].
And of course, you can’t sell anything if you don’t buy inventory. Inventory means warehouses, warehouses means logistics, and shipping software, and inventory tracking software, and at least a few people to work in the warehouse, box the book, slap a label on it…
Ah, yes, but before I give Amazon too much credit:
Amazon had the advantage of selling a book before they bought the inventory. They had a massive catalogue, fancy user interface, all important credit-card processing, and a customer who wants to buy a book — This customer wants the book bad. Positively jonesing for it. Searched for it on the 1995-era-internet — maybe even willing to wait two weeks to get it, in fact.
Amazon doesn’t need to know which book this is. They just wait until one is ordered. They charge the guy’s card, tell him it’s on it’s way! — and then they order the book from the publisher. Or from Ingram, an established book distributor & one of the largest, whose Roseburg, OR facility is a short six-hour drive from Seattle, and Amazon. —This was a massive competitive advantage & significant cost savings in the early years.
The publishers — and book distributors like Ingram — were used to this. Small bookstores order just 1 copy of a book all the time. It’s all bookstores need. This system has been in place for decades, and Amazon shows up one afternoon in 1995 and so far as the system is concerned they’re just another bookseller.
No need for massive warehouses yet — the publishers do that already. No need to stock a store or guess at the bestsellers or pick worthy books or even read the damn things — just wait for the orders, and the computer heuristics figure out the rest.
A motivated customer, with money, who is willing to wait weeks for delivery, just bought a book. Get her that book, and order a spare [to speed up delivery to the next customer] and slowly build your own stock of warehoused books. Enough of these transactions, and you’ve built yourself quite the “bookstore”, even though it’s just a warehouse. Enough of these transactions, and you know your backlist: what sells and in how many numbers [nationally! annually!] and can order up to suit.
Build a history and you can guess how many books to order next year, how sales fall off after a book is a couple of years old, how the hardcover suffers once the paperback is out — which books are your perennials, your evergreens, your annuals. Build a history for seven years (without profits) and suddenly, OMG, you not only start to make money — it seems like you’re the only bookstore that knows and that you’ve been at this forever! How did we ever live without you, Amazon?
And if you guess wrong? Hell, that’s not a problem: just take advantage of the massive distribution systems already established to feed bookstores: it’s not like selling out of your stock of a book is a bad thing: you can order just one more copy of a book, if that’s all you need. And since you’re Amazon, and buy in bulk, you get the best discount available.
Sure Amazon has distribution centers coast-to-coast now and they’re building even more — but how many of you have been Amazon customers since the very beginning? It didn’t start out this way. The Massive Multi-Billion Dollar Edifice seems like it’s always been there — but Amazon didn’t post a quarterly profit until 2001, and needed the Q4 holiday shopping binge to finally go from red-to-black for that one quarter. It was another two years before they were able to claim annual profits.
An analyst at the time was quoted by CNN: “It’s high time they learned the ropes… It’s like you’re giving a student credit for not getting an F.”
like I said: allow me to build a business for 6-going-on-7-years with a seemingly unstoppable influx of capital and no expectations to make a return on investment and I could build a trillion-dollar-company too.
Amazon is smart: they deal in information, and information is produced by every customer transaction. That’s why they send you the reminder email after you buy something, “Please review your recent purchase” — because your review is a block-o-text they can add to their item listing page (all the better for search engines) and your rating, 1 to 5 stars, is a data point they add to their crystal-ball-methods: “hey, a lot of people seem to really like this sparkly-teenage-vampire stuff, maybe we should keep an eye on it.”
But Amazon is not a book store.
Amazon doesn’t need to guess at worthy titles, and order 6 copies (each per store, times hundreds of stores) to stock tables — A table that can hold 50 books — one of a dozen or so tables in each store — and which changes out once a month.
Amazon can wait for customers to order from their catalogue, and then commit to a book.
[fine, for Amazon. Not so good for début authors]
Amazon doesn’t need to stock a hundred thousand titles, categorize, ship, receive, sort, and shelve them [by category] [thousands daily] because the computers do all that. Since there are no bookcases, only database entries, Amazon doesn’t have to do much of anything except accept your money and then figure out how to get the book. Of course, with all that data, they can write up a quick algorithm to guess at sales, order up [to say, 80% of expected sales – at least to start, for the first week] and now can have the books waiting in warehouses — $3 Billion in logistic infrastructure investments goes a long, long way, and it’s only gotten better in the 7 years since 2003.
2. The Next Bridge Too Far.
Amazon built a [*cough*] bookstore, but doesn’t have a monopoly yet. In fact, the actual bookstores seem to be running a successful “Pepsi vs Coke” campaign where number two is still a great place to be, has its own adherents and partisans, and will manage to be a thorn in Amazon’s side for decades yet.
— At least until all of us who were raised in libraries and spent our college years in bookstores are dead. *I* might not last more than 17 more years, given my lifestyle and massive beer consumption, but many members of my cohort will live on into their 60s (70s, 80s, 90s & beyond) and we’re preceded by curmudgeons of the first order, and a secondary wave of the Baby Boomer “me first” generation, who still must be appeased and catered to in ways Amazon has yet to realize.
[Please, Amazon, figure out how to take these needy bastards off my hands.]
Amazon [or Apple, or Google: pick your winner] could be the last sole provider of content that downloads direct to my nerve-stapled cortex — ‘content’ meaning professionally produced video & music & novels — but ‘content’ in this context is not the internet. Amazon is just one part of the internet, or perhaps I should say, Amazon conducts business using just one small chunk of internet. (Of course they hope to expand; everyone does)
— but you know, actually, this ‘print’ thing is available for direct ocular input and seems to do quite well for the transmission & propagation of information: almost singularly so. The paper page may die but ‘print’ lives on. The World Wide Web was “born” in 1993 and so for 18 years, we as a species have been converting everything we know into internet-capable resources, and in the end it is the web the succeeds books — not Amazon or Google. “Print” is dead; long live print — words are a wonderful thing, on screen or on paper — so long as we use words, letters, pinyin, kanji, abjad, and other black-on-white written systems, words will always be available on the net, and some will see value in hard-copy, dead tree editions, even if the primary copy is digital, even if books go digital-native.
And the Web is “free press” in a way ebooks never will be.
You’re still reading, chief — pixels or pages: we’re stuck with ‘print’.
What we are considering is delivery of print: Do you read the screen, or page, and on which device? [“device” can be considered synonymous with “format” now.]
I’ll give it 500 years. Gutenburg introduced mechanised (& eventually industrialised) print 500 years ago, and yet we still write things down, pen to paper — I doubt I’ll be here 500 years hence [would absolutely *love* to write *that* blog post] but honestly, we have to give digital at least a century to displace books.
[Music is different; unless you are a singer yourself, and sing daily, you can’t propagate copies of your music — but anyone with a stick of charcoal and a flat surface, or the modern equivalent—the graffiti spray can, can commit “print” as an act faster than authorities can clean it up or paint over it.]
##
3. “I Need This Book”
Dateline, 30 years ago: 1981. Your ‘chain’ bookstore was a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton at the local mall, most folks found new books via a book-of-the-month club, rare indeed was the local independent bookseller outside of major metropolitan areas, and if you wanted to read the latest hardcover book, you put your name on a waiting list at the library.
Someone from New York or San Francisco is about to chime in, “That’s just wrong. There was a vibrant book scene in 1981…” and yes, and kindly STFU. Like many of my readers (at least, those alive at the time), I spent the 80s in a suburban hell with no local indy, no coffee shops, the nearest mall 20 miles away, a local library that squeezed into a small space next to city hall, and a bike. Give me a break, I was like, 12. I didn’t get a car until 1990.
I was not a ‘typical’ customer but neither was my personal experience unique. In junior high and well into high school, I would ride my bike the 6 miles to the local library, load up as many books as I could carry, and ride back — twice a week. Once a month or so the family made the trek out to the mall [it was the 80s, you likely did the same] and I’d hit the bookstore with relish, spending my allowance and all but begging my parents for another dollar or three to get just one more paperback.
I never went into the library or bookstore in need of ‘just this one book’ — I went in to browse and discover. I had no idea what was out there; I was a thirsty sponge willing to soak up it all, especially science fiction & fantasy.
Now, you might attribute that to my youth: in the 80s I was that special age, 7 to 17. What the hell did I know, what the hell would I be expected to know?
…well:
Oprah didn’t have a book club until 1996, the vaunted New York Times and their book reviews reached less than a million readers outside of New York even into the 90s [& today, though more used to read it online; no telling what their new web policy actually means; the print edition has been in decline for years] — in 1980, radio hosts and TV personalities didn’t push books like Oprah once did, or Glen Beck and Fox News currently does.
Also, there was no C-SPAN2’s BookTV [which only started in 1998 – and how many of you watch C-SPAN2?]
Granted, I was not an avid consumer of radio and TV in the 80s – but prior to 1996 folks did not come into a bookstore, walk immediately up to the information desk, and demand a book, by title, only this one title will do, what do you mean you don’t have it!?
The mall bookstore didn’t have an information desk. They had a short counter with a couple of bookmarks and a register. And a bored cashier [not a bookseller] who was making less than $5 an hour.
Obviously bookstores could order it for you; they order books all the time – but prior to computerized inventory systems it wasn’t something bookstores did every day – prior to the internet web sites, it wasn’t something customers even thought to ask. Indeed, prior to 1986, it was a big, fat catalogue known as “Books in Print” — and good luck! — and even after ’86 it’d be a few years yet before you’d find a bookseller with a computer and a copy of Books in Print on CD-Rom and the wherewithal and savvy to search it for you.
Only once (back in 1990) did I need a book — but only because it was assigned to me. It wasn’t out of print, it wasn’t from a small press; I was assigned Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene for high school AP English. There was a Penguin Classics edition, in paperback — but no one had it. Neither the high school library nor the local municipal library had a copy, but that didn’t phase my English teacher, who was a royal bastard with a PhD [in education, not English, btw] and who did not care. I couldn’t even get an extension on my due date. Mom & Dad had to drive me into Atlanta to Oxford Books, the only place we could find in the phone book that had a copy.
I’d like to point out that Spenser is available for free from Project Gutenberg and as a Penguin Classic, the physical book [isbn 9780140422078] is available just about everywhere these days; the bookstore I currently work in stocks a copy [with another half-dozen copies available through our other outlets around town – not every store, only about half] though to my knowledge we’ve never actually sold one – but that just demonstrates how far even brick-and-mortar book retail has advanced in the last 20 years. As much as some hate the Big Box, it still means more books available to more folks in more places — if you can drive to the cineplex, you can drive to a bookstore, which is something we couldn’t say in 1985, or even 1992.
Parallel to the development of Big Box Books, is the explosion of the internet. And in the last 15 years, a sea change in the way book lovers shop for books.
As a young man, I was practically starving for books; I would prowl shelves at the library or bookstore and pounce on new and likely-looking titles. I shopped the bookstore, the whole bookstore — I bought books, but it wasn’t like I was shopping for a particular book. Not that just any book would do, but to an extent, yes, any book would do. [I still shop this way; though of course my current preferred method these days is to work the back room & receive books as they come in and shop right out of the box, before customers even see them — highly recommended if you can manage it] As a lover of books and avid reader of books, this whole business of “I just saw this book on TV: Gimme.” is not only annoying, but counter-productive: an author can be on TV before his book even gets back from the printer, let alone is in warehouses, or available in stores, or is available to order, from us or Amazon.
Buzz about a title is one thing, but this game is stupid, and reinforces negative public perceptions about the bookstore; I get blamed for not having books that do not physically exist yet while also bearing the full burden of stocking “all books” — a claim even Amazon can’t make — and the TV celebs and networks don’t get blamed even if the customer [when they eventually get a copy] doesn’t like the books they plug [assuming they even read it].
No. Really. Folks are buying Atlas Shrugged like the books are shipped with $50 bills inside, or maybe next week’s lottery numbers, and despite fervent protestations that Of Course they’ve read it: I very sincerely doubt folks who are hard pressed to read even one book a year are all reading *1088 pages* about trains and steel production.
##
The bookstore is set up to sell books – like a butcher sells meat, or a grocer sells vegetables, or the internet sells porn: sure, we try to have your favourite, but since we can’t sell everything we don’t try – please look at what we do have.
You can have it now, you can have it cheap, or you can have exactly what you want: but at most you get to choose two. And even if I don’t have organic free-range ostrich — fresh fillets, not pre-packaged ground meat — well, I might still have something you’d enjoy for dinner.
##
4. Amazonification
I could make all sorts of points about how Amazon.com has made fundamental changes to retail [and likely will, in some later post] but at a store-front, physical bookstore level what is more annoying is the changes Amazon has affected upon my customers. The customer base is not what it once was.
Primarily,
“Oh, you don’t have it? I’ll just order from Amazon.”
Yes. [*gritted teeth*] Thank You So Much, since I was able to find that for you after 35 solid minutes on the internet when you walked in not only with incomplete information but incorrect information, and we pulled in 3 other booksellers, and eventually found for you exactly what you wanted, something that is also available from my warehouse.
I’m [*gritted teeth and a barely constrained snarl*] so… Glad… we were able to help. Thank You for not paying my rent or payroll today.
So that’s one case. Fairly rare, if I had to admit it. Much more common are the folks who call on the telephone.
“Yeah, I’m looking at this online and wondered if you had it available for pickup today”
The short answer is no. The long answer is yes, maybe we have it, but I can’t match the online price — among other things, I have to pay rent, and pay for stock on shelves (for you to pick up today), and pay someone to answer the phone (which you just called) to answer your question. Additionally, I’m not going to have 20 copies no matter how badly you need them later today (indeed, 20 copies may not physically exist in any distribution chain anywhere) and a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
Just sayin’. And if you’re looking at it online, just order the damn thing online. No need to waste my booksellers’ time for your copy of A Gentleman’s Guide to Organic Ostrich Farming.
The web provides instant gratification: Oooh, I read a review, then follow the link, then click-click-click-BOUGHT. Go me!
And if it takes 3 days from click-click-click until you actually see your book, well, at that point you’re mad at UPS or FedEx or DHL or the old standby, the US Postal Service — but not Amazon. Amazon [or whichever web site] sold you the book, it can’t be their fault.
Unless of course you ordered the exact same book using very similar systems at a bookstore. (I can tell you, it’s the exact same system as our website if you do it from my bookstore.) If you provide us with an email address [a requirement, not an option, at Amazon] you’ll get the same updates: we’ll email you the tracking number, we’ll let you know exactly when it ships. Via EMAIL. But about twice a week I get a call at the bookstore, “But I ordered it two days ago, why isn’t it here yet?”
[*sigh*] …and there goes more of my limited payroll.
Yes, I complain. Yes, these are the interactions that stick in my memory, as they’ve taken up too much of my time. We are also able to order common books, and even a few uncommon ones, and have them delivered without problems — several hundred every week. Happy customers, happy booksellers, profits to both my corporate overlords and my store front.
& We’re all happy! Yay! Books! — but on top of that I get these really awful-book-sales experiences that amazon doesn’t, because they don’t have to (and choose not to) support every customer.
##
Folks come up to the desk multiple times every day [multiple times an hour even] [or call on the phone, an option Amazon doesn’t offer] and aver/demand, “I’m looking for a book…”
They are not asking. It’s sort-of phrased like a question, “I’m looking for book or magazine or whatever on…” but in fact it’s a demand, “I’m looking for this and you will help me, no matter how stupid or unreasonable I am, because you work here and have no choice but to capitulate, you poor bastard.” — not that they even put that much thought into it — It’s a matter of them being a ‘customer’ [sic] [note: real customers spend money] and us being retail wage slaves.
“I never go to bookstores or hardly any retail stores any more. Salespeople with a superior or condescending attitude are the worst. It’s totally inappropriate given their place in the food chain.”
[that’s a really fun thread, btw, for both pro & con bookseller views.]
Even if “customers” don’t think of it that way, they’re asking for a lot: they’re asking me or my booksellers for expert help, often help in shaping the search, or help in clarifying partial and misremembered details, or help identifying an author, or basic things like which subject, which topics, which keywords, and for the really tough ones: how to spell Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Italian, or Spanish keywords and author names. Help they don’t get from Amazon, by the way. Just sayin’.
… or the type of help not even trained psychiatric professionals would be able to provide
…but this is my ‘customer base’. Love you guys.
Note: Not the tech-savvy computer people. They can use Google, they can figure out what they want – many if not all of them then order online.
Not the the smart people: these folks know what they want, too, and can remember the two pertinent data points (title, author) even if it took an hour to drive into the store, or five whole minutes to walk from the car to our info desk.
No, I get everyone else
what’s the title? “I don’t know”
or the author? “I don’t remember”
ah. Is it fiction or non-fiction? “Definitely fiction. It’s a true story.”
Ah. …so it’s a biography? “No, not a biography, I said it was a true story. It’s a memoir.”
Ah. …so a new memoir about…? “I don’t remember. But it was just on Oprah, or 20/20. Or 60 minutes. Or maybe CNN or Fox — you know, on TV. Can’t you find it from that? I just told you it’s a new fiction memoir that was on TV or maybe the radio sometime in the past month and while I can’t remember the author or title I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”
##
Some days — I’ll be honest with you — some days I *can't wait* to go out of business if that is to be my eventual fate, if only to see the look on the face of this particular type of customer.
Amazon does not play 20 questions. There is no app for this. Amazon can’t deal with incorrect and conflicting input, as Amazon is a computer. Amazon has no idea what it’s like to have a demanding customer come in and treat you like a personal shopper [please note, personal shoppers get paid much more per hour than retail clerks] only to have said customer return it all in two days because a ‘better’ gift idea occurred to them.
Web sites like Amazon took the easy customers from me; the ones who could help themselves, the ones who bought the most books, the ones who love books and recommend them to friends (some still do so in person, but many more just email the link).
I have many reasons to hate Amazon, not least of which is they just might manage to put me out of a job. But primarily I hate them because they’ve squeezed a lot of the profits and fun out of my job, and I’m left doing the drudge work — often doing their drudge work because I’ll still spend a half hour with a customer who then says, “Oh? You don’t have it in stock, today, and at a discount? I’ll just buy it from Amazon”
##
I don’t even have time in this essay to complain about the college students who call every semester looking for text books. [OK, I’ll make a little time:] If only we as a society could, I don’t know, maybe open up a set of specialist ‘college’ bookstores on or near campus to help these customers. These ‘college’ bookstores could even get syllabi from the instructors so they’d have the books in stock before classes start, so students wouldn’t have to call all the local general bookstores looking for $200 texts the day after.
But of course I’m just speaking out my ass: there’s no way anyone or any campus would open such a bookstore — obviously no one has based on the number of calls I have to take almost every week – speaking of which, I thought classes were taught on a regular schedule? either you kids are waiting way past the last minute or you’re just messing with me.
“Books are the last bastion of analog,” [Bezos] says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We’re in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world’s largest virtual store. “Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn’t.” Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That’s shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer’s recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy.
The fight isn’t for publishers or mass-market acceptance, or readers per se. The fight is for “vibrant pockets of book lovers” and we’re already on the net. [I say “we”, I’m one of them.] Some partisans fight for libraries, some for bookstores, some for genres, some for capital-L-Literature and some just to be read themselves. Indeed, some readers on the internet will argue until they’re blue in the face that ebooks are better and I’m an anachronism, fighting for carriages and steeplechase in an age of jet travel and fibre-optic cable.
This is not a war between Amazon & Bookstores — it’s not a war at all — it is a much larger conversation about books, and how books are packaged and propagated, & to a lesser extent on how books are bought & sold. Before we decide on a single answer and close off other paths, we need years yet [decades, if we can manage] to figure out just what books are — surprisingly, we haven’t even answered that question yet, even after centuries
I will hang on for as long as I can, the noble opposition fighting the good fight, even if I know or might guess I’m on the losing side.
Books have value. Libraries have a value that goes beyond books, if only we can convince governments of that. [we might need a 21st century Carnegie, a billionaire who loves books and loves to give away money to support them]
and Bookstores also have value; I have made this a basis of my own personal career.
and Bookselling has value that goes beyond, and will survive bookstores.
I get the same PR blasts via email as the rest of you (well, the rest of you bloggers) (actually, I probably get some weirder ones than most) and of course, every PR wonk ends their exhortation the same way,
“We hope you’ll spread the word about [product x] to your readers. Please let us know if there’s anything [blah, blah, blah]”
Typically, these go strait into the trash barely skimmed or entirely unread. However, in this instance I had just emailed a friend of mine about this particular event the day before, and was planning on going myself. It was… odd… to see it show up in mailbox so soon.
##
Anyway,
Looks like Fathom is doing a LOTR Extended Edition screening on three successive Tuesday nights, June 14, 21, & 28. Click on the links, or on the image below.
The playing time of the earliest wax cylinders was only 2 minutes.
As the name implies, the phonograph cylinders were wax and could only be replayed 100 times or so before they had to be replaced. [though worn out cylinders could be “erased” and reused for home recordings]
Later cylinders made of celluoid and phenolic resins like Amberol (you may have heard of a similar material brand-named Bakelite) lasted much longer, and in fact Edison [you know, the guy who invented the damn things] came up with a way to double the information packed on cylinders, so you could listen for all of *4 minutes*. [Whoa, give me a minute, I think I’m getting the vapors]
So by the 30s you have Columbia introducing the LP — 10 minutes to a side playing at 33½ rpms on 10” discs — and RCA Victor (not wanting to pay licensing fees for Columbia’s patents) introducing the 7” 45 (which ran at 45rpms — hence the name) (* for those of you who have previously heard of 45s, of course)
The competing formats [which used different spindle sizes and ran at different speeds] shaped the music that was released – and while a number of disc-switching systems were employed to get around size/time limitations, for the most part songs were truncated to the format. The 3-4 minute single is a direct result of the 45. When folks today talk about an EP (~15min, 3-5 songs) or an LP (~40min., the Album of my youth) (or of Albums, for that matter) they use a nomenclature descended from the limitations of grooves in plastic. Wikipedia has a wealth of information on all this minutiae.
The point I would like to make, my major digression before I get to the actual argument I’d like to make in this post, is that consumer music on distributed media in the 88 years between Edison and Rubber Soul was almost exclusively the sale and distribution of singles — a single song, just like 99¢ downloads today. The limits of technology at the time meant an operational upper limit of about 270 seconds. Even prior to discs — before cylinders even, of either wax or plastic — there was printed sheet music, and player piano rolls, which were also largely limited to single songs — and the music business being what it is, of course parties whose profits depended on one model sued the new technology in court: Wikipedia also has an article on the White-Smith ruling. This is a pattern repeated many times and covered at leasttwice in depth by folks who know more about the issue than I do.
But the rights & formats & changing technology are secondary to the primary economics of consumption: except for a golden period in the late 60s and throughout the 70s [the era from Rubber Soul to MTV] the industry was ALLABOUT the production of singles and the mass consumption of “hits” — through the 50s, 60s, disco in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the decade just past: rare indeed was the artist who released an album as a preconceived artistic whole, and so many of those were also supported by the release of singles that it’d be hard to envision an ongoing music industry without them.
Thriller? Seven of it’s nine songs were released as singles, and the stature of the album itself (to say nothing of it’s record-breaking sales) are as much about the success of the singles as in the album’s “concept” — if it has one. Purple Rain? It even has a movie, right? Can’t separate the tracks from the album — except they did, releasing the title track, Let’s Go Crazy, and When Doves Cry (along with two other tracks that no one remembers) as singles — and just like I can’t think of the name of any other track, I doubt anyone except die-hard Prince fans could even hum a few bars without the album playing in the background.
Classic albums, even Dark Side of the Moon, the 1973 masterwork and ur-concept album — the platonic ideal form of the concept album — all have at least one ‘best’ track that ends up as the single. Floyd’s label released both Time and Money from DSotM, likely without consulting the band. [“btw, which one’s Pink?” & the other lyrics from ‘Have a Cigar’ on Wish You Were Here released 2 years later seems the best commentary on that]
So some few albums aside: it’s all about the single. The single is what we want, and even though artists continued to release album-length CDs throughout the 80s & 90s, we only grudgingly bought the whole disc just to get one or two songs we like. For about 20 years, recording industry profits were unfairly inflated as they were charging $8 — then $10, then $15, then $18 — for a pair of singles.
Add onto that as well the large proportion of fans repurchasing their entire collection on CD: 20 and 30 (and 40) year old albums that wouldn’t have sold otherwise that suddenly found new life, and the ability to package even third-tier artists’ output into ‘greatest hit’ collections that would sell. [Even if, once again, all we wanted were the one or two hits.]
##
Many would point to the death of the music chains as a dire premonition for all retailers of packaged entertainment. Oh look, there goes Borders. Watch it, Blockbuster is next.
The advent of downloadable music led to decreased album sales, decreased sales of physical media, the bankruptcy of several chains that sold music [though some individual stores and ‘indy’ music stores seem to be doing OK – many of them by increasing their stock of vinyl!] and in general, much soiling of pants by music industry executives.
*Allow me to call bullshit* : The music industry collapsed because the CD format (and CD pricing) led to an unsustainable bubble built on the $18 price point cited above (for 2 good songs and an hour of dross) and the once-in-a-format buying binge as customers built a “library” — you only re-buy your collection once, though, and once you’ve bought ‘enough’ you fall back to your normal (& typically very sparse) buying habits.
The “rediscovery” of the single by the shopping public made possible by per-track purchases (and the occasional illegal download) supposedly led to the collapse of album sales, but it should come as no surprise that as soon as we could drop the 11 tracks of filler [at an unjustified markup] and just pay for the songs we liked — well, we did so.
(Perhaps many of us downloaded them illegally first — but the whole industry went into transition for a solid 10 years starting in 1999, and one could certainly write a whole book on that. The fact that Apple and Amazon make money off of music proves “piracy”, while real, is not the bugbear the RIAA wants you to think it is.)
I’d argue that the point where we all hit ‘enough’ CDs for our library just happened to coincide with the advent of digital downloads, two trends which both resulted in decreased album sales but also two separate and distinct trends the recording industry unfairly conflated — an assumption which led more or less directly to their present day stupidity like suing fans for liking music, and withdrawing from digital when they should have embraced the new format as firmly as they once did CDs — to the point where they were pushing CDs down our throat. This misstep means they ceded the initiative, and the profits, to Apple — and to Amazon, to a lesser extent. This is ground that they will never make up, and soon the artists [who actually make the music] & the tech companies [who now distribute it] will meet somewhere in the middle and wonder just what the recording industry is for, anyway?
##
One more quick aside: The movie companies suffered from a similar blindness, but also benefited from format changes and the associated bubble as we rushed to build our personal movie collections (something one couldn’t even do in the 70s, unless you owned a film projector) – in fact, the studios got to hit us twice, selling us the same movies on VHS & DVD (and now Blu-ray) and even as ticket sales slump (a trend hidden by ever-increasing ticket prices) they showed improving profits — and developed whole new profit centers.
In some cases, the film libraries are worth more than the current production studios. Movies differ from music in that prior to VHS, there was no collector or home consumer market: you bought the ticket while it was out in theaters and that’s it. Even the occasional broadcast on TV hardly holds a candle to DVD.
So movies finally made their way into a market that music had been developing since 1880. Not surprisingly, there was pent-up demand — in fact, ask any blogger what they want to see on DVD or Blu-ray and even if they blog about business or book retail or manga of all things, I’m sure after some thought said blogger would be able to give you a Top 10 wishlist of things that should be out and available for exorbitant prices but isn’t. Stop worrying about bittorrent, guys. Fire your lawyers and hire archivists — the money is sitting in vaults, on celluloid that is deteriorating as we speak.
##
Anyway.
As stated up top: Books are not Music
CDs can be deconstructed into individual tracks — indeed, the single is the “default” unit of music and CDs are the artificial construct: when given the option, we want CDs broken up so we can buy just the tracks we need. In contrast to music, books have always been a long-form art, and even short stories take a hell of a lot more than 4 minutes to read. [If you can read a short story in 2 minutes, that tells me the author worked and agonized, for weeks or months to write something that short, and you need to go back and read it again. now. I’ll wait.]
Songs are played on the radio, available from our personal libraries, available via streaming services, and otherwise permeate our life, and except for our teens — when we soak up new music like life-giving water [and the once-every-20-years format changes, when we’re forced to repurchase the music of our youth] — actual music purchases are fairly rare.
Books aren’t movies, either, for that matter: Both music and movies are passive entertainment — you can turn on the radio and have it playing in the background while you write, or cruise the web, or study, or make sweet sweet love, or many other tasks that require more of your attention. Similarly, I can put on a DVD and simultaneously cram popcorn in my maw while either drinking beer or letting my hands roam over a willing partner [an activity that usually ends with us missing the last half of the movie, but hey, that’s one more argument for owning the DVD].
Movies and music are passive entertainment; we can sit back and do other things while we enjoy them. Seeing a first run movie in a theater is more engaging than watching videos at home — but I think many of us have noted how many other people manage to text, talk, or tweet their way through a movie [you and I would never do that though] — or have noted with distress the jackhole who thinks he’s MST3K but wittier and who maintains a running commentary through the whole thing. [most of you have a tire iron in your trunk; I’m not advocating violence against jackholes but I thought I’d remind you it’s there]
Books are active and engaging. You don’t read a book while you write blog posts and surf the web. Hopefully you don’t read books while driving – mostly because you can’t, but also because it would be dangerous to try. You might be able to page through a magazine, skimming the ads and reading only the article headlines, while talking with friends or otherwise doing something else but when you sit down to read a book: That is all you are doing: You are reading a book, and it takes up your whole brain.
Sure, you can listen to music while you read and I often do: but the one is just background noise, while the other engages you to the point it crowds out everything else.
You can sell music by the track, and assemble playlists from many disparate sources. You can sell TV series by the episode, and while we occasionally marathon a whole series in a single sitting, it is much more common to take TV shows in half-hour to hour chunks, and to keep at least a half dozen ‘stories’ going at a time, at the rate of one episode a week.
Dickens and his serialized novels aside: when we buy a book we buy the whole damn thing, and read the whole damn thing, and the reading of it takes over our whole imagination — and even in a series consisting of several books we only begrudgingly admit that it takes a while to write a book, and given a preference we’d read a whole series at once rather than wait between installments. There are the Twilight books as an example, of course, or Potter mania from a few years back, or the agonizing wait Martin has put us through with “The Song of Ice & Fire” [Game of Thrones for the newbs who only heard about it from HBO] — or King, or Patterson, or Steele, or Woods, or Block, or authors sadly passed who will write no new books, or the next series in your favourite genre that you haven’t even heard of yet.
Readers are obsessive.
Not everyone is a reader; certainly more folks passively consume music [because they’re stuck in a car during a commute, or it’s playing as Muzak on speakers in most public spaces we inhabit] and Movies & TV are a mass media in ways that books will never be. […alas. and our society is poorer for it]
In fact, a book is usually only considered a success after it get picked up for [inferior] TV or Movie adaptation — so very sad. Even a “bestseller” will get a sales bump from a movie, because the movie-going public just aren’t readers.
##
Sure, I sell to a niche. And at least two large chunks of that niche [genre readers and avid fans of a particular author, whichever author] are getting peeled off by digital readers: I’m beat, usually by price and certainly in ‘instant gratification’ metrics.
For music, there is radio. And when there were record stores, there was radio. While there were concerts, there was radio — when digital downloads and online streaming and customizable channels and personalized suggestions all hit the scene, there was radio. We can argue that it sucks now, and many of the music stations really, really do suck: but they still broadcast, and it’s still one way (the primary way?) most folks discover new music — if only because broadcast radio is a mass distribution channel, about as ubiquitous as these things get. Seems old fashioned; but still there. Radio is not dead yet.
For books: yes, there are online sales sites and reviews and blogs — and to an extent, customizable channels and personalized suggestion services — but the primary, mass distribution channel is still books on shelves: the retailer. Seems old fashioned, quaint even. But actually bricks-and-mortar retail isn’t going away anytime soon.
[One could argue whether your “bookstore” in 15 years time will be just another small department in Walmart and Costco, but that’s a different essay — and if you ask a publisher whether they’d prefer that kind of channel or an actual bookstore, even a crippled, suffering bookstore that is a pale shadow of the 90s chains on only a fraction of their former salesfloor footprint — well, I think we know which they’d pick]
Books engage. Books demand. Books compel. I can do other things while I listen to music, or while a video plays — but when I read a book I Read and I find myself all but incapable of doing anything else. I can’t even drink beer — well, I can, but I only think to pick up the beer stein at the end of each chapter.
I’m not worried about the new digital landscape — if the world of bookselling changes so much that it’s all online, then well, the online players will need booksellers. I think I’ll be able to find my way. Books are not music, after all. You can make up your own mind about a song in about 5 minutes — in fact, you can listen to the whole damn song in that amount of time in nearly every case.
Books take longer to appreciate, and more skill to sell.
Also, publishers are embracing digital publishing in a way the recording industry never did — and still hasn’t. I’m not saying publishers volunteered to host this party, but now that everyone is showing up, they’ve sent the interns out to buy chips and dip and a digital keg.
Also, there is no related format-bubble like the CD or DVD binge as customers re-bought all their old favourite titles over again to build their new library…
Well… unless you count digital books as the new-format bubble that will eventually pop. (I’m not going to push the point or force you to confront it: I’m just going to leave that little gem right here where I can link to it later.)
As long as there are books, and readers, there will be bookstores. And Amazon is not a bookstore, which is my next topic.
Top Imprints
Number of titles ranking in the Manga 500:
Viz Shonen Jump 95
Viz Shojo Beat 67
Tokyopop 56
Yen Press 56
Viz Shonen Jump Advanced 39
Vizkids 29
HC/Tokyopop 18
Seven Seas 16
Kodansha Comics 15
Del Rey 14
Today, we all know ATMs, use them on at least a weekly basis (maybe more, maybe less) and digital banking has advanced to the point that between direct deposit and debit cards and online bill payments, it is possible to conduct all of one’s personal financial transactions without touching a single piece of paper, let alone paper money. [my water & sewer bill is the last one still mailed to me on paper; thanks to my new landlord, I’ve even been able to transition to paying my rent online]
There are other technologies involved, and a number of connected networks and digital adaptations of old technologies (e-checks, anyone?) and of course, the internet — all of which enable various forms of digital and automated banking.
And yet: there are still banks. In my neighborhood, two new branches opened in just the past year – banks I’d certainly never heard of before so they’re either brand new or represent expansions of out-of-town banks.
You can walk into any bank and guess what: you’ll still see a bank teller. (Fewer than there used to be, sure, but still a person.) Past the main counter, folks still work in bank offices, and if you want to open an account, or get a loan, or purchase CDs (certificates of deposit) you’ll end up talking to one of these bankers: specialists in their field, still ready to help for all the things that can’t yet be done online. Some services and interactions just can’t be online, and likely never will be.
##
In 1961, patrons at the City Bank of New York had the option to use an ATM, but apparently so few trusted the machine to make their deposit (cash withdrawals weren’t available) the device was removed 6 months later.
Digital banking in all of its glory took time.
Digital publishing will also take time, and I think the analogy to banking is apt: even when most things are digital, some will completely forgo digital by choice while most of us will still revert to paper for some options, and will still own at least a few things on paper because of convenience or personal preference, and that paper as a whole will be impossible to get rid of.
After all, you still have cash in your wallet, right? (Or if you don’t: you see a lack of cash as a problem to be addressed, and not a goal to be working toward.)
So: 40 years. And digital books had a false start 11 years ago, as well, with a major push by Stephen King and his digital-only short story, “Riding the Bullet”, which was downloaded a half a million times soon after release — over dial-up! this was 2000 — and which made a splash even in the print media: I love this reaction in the New York Times [25 March, 2000] which also includes this choice bit quoting Microsoft:
“In lavish ads heralding its new ‘book-like’ device, Microsoft Reader, it touts ‘the best estimates of Microsoft researchers and developers’ about the post-print future: E-books will start outselling printed books in 2009; newspapers will abandon paper editions in 2018; Webster’s will alter its first definition of ‘book’ to refer to writing read on a screen by 2020.”
Stephen King made the cover of Time that same week [dated 27 March, 2000] though to their credit, the cover story in that issue predicted how “amateur” and user-generated content would “win”, and make the internet what it is today.
Sony introduced their first ereader in 2004 — not THE first ereader, but a milestone. In 2005, Amazon bought their way into the market, with their own device to follow in 2007. [as near as I can determine, the first dedicated e-reader devices were the SoftBook and Rocket eBook — the device was known as an eBook, not the files — both of which came out in 1998. Back in ’98, an ereader weighed 3 pounds, had a battery life of about 5 hours and used a black-and-white LCD screen.] So the devices are between 7 and 14 years old, depending on how one would care to count it — one could even make the argument that “ereaders” in the collective consciousness and as a “mass market” device are only a year old, as prior to 21 June, 2010 no device (that anyone had heard of, anyway) sold for less than $250.
[We’re still waiting for the sub-$100 unit. There’s your e-book revolution, right there, and when a decent sub-$100 dedicated ereader comes out—if it does—then I’ll start worrying about the future of bookstores]
##
Publishers are among the most conservative and change-averse companies out there, quite similar to banks in that regard. But publishers are also among the most responsive to their customers—their readers—and relatively quick to respond to trends.
The shift to ebooks came as a result of customer acceptance, not because of some inherent superiority of the digital format — if digital books really were better, they would have taken off in 2000, not 2010.
The two business are not directly comparable, but even after decades of moving toward automation and taking both the paper and the people out of banking, one can still be employed as a bank teller (indeed, the banks are still hiring) and the bank branches are still open. Now, one could argue that the physical branches are only part of the overall business, and that banks make their money elsewhere, and in fact the “store front” is subsidized by all this other business & the profits made with and by computers in digital markets and transactions.
Sure. Fair enough.
And this differs from, say, a Barnes & Noble, Inc. in, say, 2021 how exactly? There may be fewer branches, and fewer booksellers in 10 years time, and the store front may be subsidized by the digital business, and most folks would rather use the website or buy direct off of a device or whatever.
In 2021 we may have all traded in our debit cards for smart phones using NFC, and maybe folks under 30 won’t know what a check or a check book is, let alone still use them, and maybe, finally, after six decades the banks will finally begin to close branches because we all use the website & ATMs.
Could happen. I doubt it, but could happen. I personally think that as long as cash is an option, I’ll still have a corner bank with a bored teller behind the counter, thankful to see an actual customer and willing to spend extra time with me because *I* took the extra time to do things in person, and helping me is their job: a role the bank is willing to subsidize because 15 minutes of actual human contact can buy years-worth of loyalty and justifies (in the customers’ minds) all the other transactions that take place online and through devices.
Similarly, a smart company will still have booksellers [fewer of us, but…] and will still run a storefront with actual books [likely fewer of these, too, sadly, but…] and if a customer chooses, they can still come into a bookstore and chat with a bookseller and get recommendations and browse and discover books in a way that is impossible to do online.
…because 15 minutes of actual human contact can buy years-worth of loyalty and justifies (in the customers’ minds) all the other transactions that take place online and through devices. and see also: Fill the Showroom, Sales Will Follow at PublishersWeekly.com
In ten years time, I will still be a bookseller. Hell, I’ll likely still be working in the same damn branch of the same damn store, the one I started at more than 10 years ago.
Top Imprints
Number of titles ranking in the Manga 500:
Viz Shonen Jump 89
Tokyopop 61
Viz Shojo Beat 60
Yen Press 60
Viz Shonen Jump Advanced 37
Vizkids 32
Viz 19
HC/Tokyopop 18
Del Rey 16
Kodansha Comics 14
29. ↓-1 (28) : Finder Series 3 One Wing in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Mar 2011 [210.8] :: 70. ↑19 (89) : Finder Series 4 Prisoner in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Aug 2011 [126.7] :: 71. ↓-21 (50) : Silver Diamond 9 – Tokyopop, Apr 2011 [126.1] :: 178. ↑13 (191) : Caged Slave (novel) – DMP Juné, May 2008 [63.6] :: 222. ↓-8 (214) : Crimson Snow – Tokyopop Blu, Mar 2011 [53.0] :: 223. ↓-161 (62) : Incubus Master (Kindle ebook) 1 – Yaoi Press, Jan 2010 [52.3] :: 238. ↓-39 (199) : Finder Series 1 Target in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Sep 2010 [50.1] :: 280. ↑102 (382) : The Tyrant Falls in Love 3 – DMP Juné, May 2011 [42.9] :: 283. ↓-71 (212) : Finder Series 2 Cage in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Nov 2010 [42.4] :: 299. ↑77 (376) : The Lonely Egotist (novel) – DMP Juné, Mar 2009 [40.3] ::
I hear ebook this and ebook that so much — not only from news sources but from my corporate overlords — it makes me sick. Sure, ebooks are growing, but I feel the time and attention (not to mention resources, financial and otherwise) focused on ebooks are missing the point.
Yes, Ebooks are blowing open new holes in the publishing industry. New! Shiny! You can read ‘em on your iPad!
…but folks are still buying a lot of paper.
Let’s start off with a messy graph.
& let me break it down for you: The red line tracks adult hardcover sales, the yellow one is trade paperbacks, the green one is mass markets — this is just for those three categories as reported by publishers.org — so no kids books, no text books, no teen books [classed as Young Adult by most pubs, so part of the ‘childrens/YA’ chunk of AAP’s data] but the “Adult Trade” category is the still largest part of the trade market.
(Text books completely blow any segment of the “trade” market out of the water — which makes all kinds of sense given the price points, numbers of students, number of classes taken, and the requirement to use a text. But no one says anything about e- compared to the text book market, yet.)
(and I’ve posted these numbers before — well, most of these numbers: I’ve added data for Sep. 2010 to Feb. 2011 as they became available — which you can go see laying aroundhere and there on this blog)
The Latest News, widely repeated, is that purple line: unit sales of ebooks.
For February 2011, ebooks ranked as the #1 format among all categories of Trade publishing (Adult Hardcover, Adult Paperback, Adult Mass Market, Children’s/Young Adult Hardcover, Children’s/Young Adult Paperback).
This one-month surge is primarily attributed to a high level of strong post-holiday e-Book buying, or “loading,” by consumers who received e-Reader devices as gifts. Experts note that the expanded selection of e-Readers introduced for the holidays and the broader availability of titles are factors.
Additionally, Trade publishing houses cite ebooks as generating fresh consumer interest in—and new revenue streams for—“backlist” titles, books that have been in print for at least a year. Many publishers report that e-Book readers who enjoy a newly-released book will frequently buy an author’s full backlist.
For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, ebooks grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.
I have done a bit of massaging to the AAP reported sales numbers. I divided sales for each by an average unit price to find an estimated number of units sold. It actually makes the rise of ebooks a bit more dramatic.
What the press release skips over is something I think most of us can see: January and February are awful months for publishers — among the worst (when they are not in fact the worst) two months of the whole year. This is because book retailers bought their stock back in September and now they’re running clearance sales, cutting back on displays, and recovering from the December shopping orgy.
I put a vertical gray line into the chart to point that out for you.
Sales of ebooks, though, are instantaneous. There are no physical storefronts [just online ‘shops’] and publishers get to bank that sale right away. The messy, seasonally-variable and returns-prone book business just doesn’t affect ebooks: that’s why the three trade categories wobble like an EKG, and the e-book graph just goes up and to right in ways that make MBA’s hearts skip a beat.
You tell me, based on the first graph. Which business do you want to be in?* [it’s a trick question, but you may not have figured out why yet.]
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Let me simplify things. Please allow me to add back childrens’ books, and the university presses [but not text books, yet], and the “professional” category which includes quite a few computer books & building codes and some other stuff I carry — and then add everything up to get to an honest ‘bookstore’ number. And let me take the wobble out of the graph: I’ve enough data culled from AAP press releases to compute a rolling 12-month average for this same time period.
This distributes the Christmas rush over the whole year, and makes the time delays related to shipping books to retailers moot: we can see the direction books are actually heading.
I think you’ll be surprised.
and let me re-quote one paragraph from the AAP press release:
For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, ebooks grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.
Dead Tree Artefacts still outsell Digital Files 3 to 1 — for the first two months following the gifting of millions of ereader devices — and for the two months of historically abysmal revenue for publishers. Ebooks are doing quite well, but are not the whole book market quite yet, even during the winter sales slump.
We’re not just comparing apples to oranges, we’re comparing apples to digital downloads: and the apples are still selling.
##
For the data above I assumed an average price per print book of $15, and an average price for e-book of $10. I assumed publishers gave retailers of whichever sort the standard %40 discount off of list prices. And the AAP reports publisher revenue: all those free, public domain ebooks or sales by self-published authors aren’t included.
Please note the green line is largely flat. Please note that book sales are seasonal, and when a press release comes out saying one format (ebooks) outsell another format (hardcover, whatever) that’s because the people tracking these numbers split things into at least a dozen categories, and we can play with numbers all we like, and make them say lots of things, especially if we do a press release in March, instead of November.
Your take-away:
1. Book Sales are seasonal, but after accounting for seasonality: Actually Print Book Sales Are Flat.
2. Ebooks are growing. Obviously. And it is much too early to predict when those sales are going to level off: but I’ll tell you, ebooks can’t maintain exponential growth forever and eventually, yes, it’s going to level off. [I’ll refer you to the manga bubble, 1998 to 2007, for those with short memories: just because it’s E- doesn’t make it immune to market forces.]
Ebooks are the only segment of the industry that is growing right now. So they get a lot of attention.
However: I ran the math, and ebooks aren’t cannibalizing sales of physical books. (yet.)
3. Text Books are still the market to crack. The person or company who manages a “kindle” for elementary, secondary, and college text books is going to be rich.
7.2 Billion Dollars Annually, equal to all ebooks and trade books combined.
Top Imprints
Number of titles ranking in the Manga 500:
Viz Shonen Jump 73
Yen Press 67
Tokyopop 64
Viz Shojo Beat 62
Viz Shonen Jump Advanced 33
Vizkids 33
HC/Tokyopop 18
Del Rey 16
Viz 15
Kodansha Comics 13
118. ↔0 (118) : March Story 1 – Viz Signature, Oct 2010 [101.5] :: 222. ↑8 (230) : Jack Frost 3 – Yen Press, Jul 2010 [54.0] :: 233. ↑ (last ranked 13 Feb 11) : March Story 2 – Viz Signature, Apr 2011 [49.0] :: 248. ↑313 (561) : Priest vols 1-3 collection – Tokyopop, Jun 2011 [46.4] :: 341. ↓-3 (338) : Jack Frost 4 – Yen Press, Dec 2010 [33.2] :: 394. ↑121 (515) : Laon 3 – Yen Press, Sep 2010 [27.5] :: 428. ↓-38 (390) : Bride of the Water God 7 – Dark Horse, Feb 2011 [24.8] :: 434. ↑111 (545) : Raiders 3 – Yen Press, Jul 2010 [24.4] :: 457. ↑ (last ranked 20 Feb 11) : One Fine Day 2 – Yen Press, May 2010 [22.5] :: 478. ↓-132 (346) : Black God 12 – Yen Press, Mar 2011 [21.3] ::
On June 1, 2015 (after 6 years and 11 months) I needed to relaunch/restart this blog, or at least rekindle my interest in maintaining and updating it.
Rather than delete and discard the whole thing, I instead moved the blog -- database, cms, files, archives, and all -- to this subdomain. When you encounter broken links (and you will encounter broken links) just change the URL in the address bar from www.rocketbomber.com to archive.rocketbomber.com.
I know this is inconvenient, and for that I apologise. In addition to breaking tens of thousands of links, this also adversely affects the blog visibility on search engines -- but that, I'm willing to live with. Between the Wayback Machine at Archive.org and my own half-hearted preservation efforts (which you are currently reading) I feel nothing has been lost, though you may have to dig a bit harder for it.
As always, thank you for reading. Writing version 1.0 of Rocket Bomber was a blast. For those that would like to follow me on the 2.0 - I'll see you back on the main site.
In my head, I sound like Yahtzee (quite a feat, given my inherited U.S.-flat-midwestern-accent.)
where I start my browsing day...
...and one source I trust for reviews, reports, and opinion on manga specifically. [disclaimer: I'm a contributor there]
attribution
RocketBomber is a publication of Matt Blind, some rights reserved: unless otherwise noted in the post, all articles are non-commercial CC licensed (please link back, and also allow others to use the same data where applicable).
