ebooks now outselling paperbacks!

[Fried Egg]

Amazon's ebook sales eclipse paperbacks for the first time

"Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books.

"This is across Amazon.com's entire US book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher."

This is somewhat worrying for me I must admit. I have never read a e-book on an reader, and from what I can tell they do look pretty good. However there's something about having a book in your hand that I love which a book reader could never replace. Not to mention the pleasure of wandering around a bookshop.

I would hate it if it ever became the case that only the likely best-sellers were released with hard copies. The other day for the first time I was thwarted from a potential book purchase when I was confronted with the fact that the book was only available in e-book format.

Which brings me to a curious point. The above quote makes no mention of the fact that more and more books are now available only in e-book format. Are they trying to big-up the figures? Do they want most people to buy their books in electronic format?

 

[Ursa major]

Any company will want to reduce its cost. I expect warehousing is one of Amazon's and the holding of stock another**. Shipping electronic copies must make sense for Amazon.


Speaking as someone who has little knowledge of ebooks and ereaders and the contract (implied or explicit) between, say, Amazon and the human reader, I do have a couple of questions:

1. Who audits the sales? With real books, the publisher has to deliver x number of books to the retailer (including Amazon). With an electronic book, this doesn't have to happen. Is each copy given a unique identifier? (I'm not accusing any seller of ebooks of fraud, but if I were a publisher, I'd want to know exactly what my sales through a retailer were.
2. What happens to Amazon when all books are e-books? Its rôle as a warehouser of books will have gone, replaced, one assumes, by direct sales from the publisher or author (or agent?). Does Amazon become a repository of reviews. A reseller of ebooks? A supplier of ereaders?

** - Depending on its financial arrangement with each publisher.

 

[chopper]

your last point is the telling one, ursa (though i say this as someone with an interest in selling ebooks...) - amazon are out to promote their nifty kindle device, and today's story obviously does that. somehow i don't think paper books will disappear - anything that is ebook only right now is most likely (*coff*) a self-published effort - as even the rabid kindle fan i know still gleefully runs off to waterstones to get his fix of "proper-book" once every other week.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I think Amazon is trying to promote its Kindle device right now, and I suspect that they are manipulating the figures and playing with words a little bit.

They say Kindle is outselling paperback books. If you look at the listings on Amazon, when they say "paperback," they mean trade paperback. When they mean mass market paperback, they say "mass market paperback." So are they counting both of those together, or just the trade paperbacks, which are more expensive and and don't put up nearly the same numbers as the mass market books.

Mass market books are named that for a reason. They don't just sell them online and in bookstores. They sell them in a lot of places where you will find few, if any, of the trade paperbacks or hardcover. If Amazon is leaving those out of the equation, then what they are saying is not the same thing that most people reading that statement will think they are saying.

It's not surprising that the Kindle books also outsell hardcover. A lot of hardcover books are hideously expensive.

 

[Radix]

Books (like music) I need to have up on the shelf (by author/artist)
in chronological order-

 

[Vertigo]

I'm not too surprised by this and even if Amazon have manipulated the figures (or the meaning behind the figures) I believe that manipulation will become academic in a short while as the growth of ebooks continues. It really is not so different to the progression of music from vinyl to CD to downloaded files. There were many who loved vinyl and thought CD had a cold, clinical sound but that didn't stop them taking over. Now there are many who complain (quite correctly) that downloaded music is not as high quality as uncompressed music on a CD. But the convenience of downloaded MP3's seems to be taking over (don't know the figures bout I would expect downloaded music to overtake CD sales before long if they haven't already). Most people most of the time are not listening to their music closely enough to appreciate any loss of quality.

My point is that the same will happen with books whether the readers of today like it or not. Many of you undoubtedly like hard copy books - the feel and even the smell of the paper - but in the end, in this day and age, convenience always wins out over aesthetics and I am completely convinced that ebooks will eventually take over from hard copies. Unlike compressed music there is no loss of quality of the content only the aesthetic appeal of the medium. For the time being the only drawback is the poor quality of illustrations, photos, maps and that sort of thing and that will only improve with the technology. I think I read recently that the first full colour screens with the same sort of energy conservation as the current eInk screens are on their way.

I'm afraid whether you like it or not ebooks will be the future of reading. To deny this is to put yourself in the same camp as people that said "talkie movies" would never take off or TV would never take over from radio, or mobile phones are just a fad.

Who audits the sales? With real books, the publisher has to deliver x number of books to the retailer (including Amazon). With an electronic book, this doesn't have to happen. Is each copy given a unique identifier? (I'm not accusing any seller of ebooks of fraud, but if I were a publisher, I'd want to know exactly what my sales through a retailer were.

I don't know the details on this one but I suspect it is already covered. You would be surprised how many times you get "Out of Stock" when trying ot buy an eBook (particularly on the Book Depository). This implies that the distributor buys a fixed number of licences (or some such) for a particular book and then can no longer sell that book until they buy in more licences.

As to your second question I think Amazon will still continue. Whilst publishers may (and do) sell their own eBooks direct (eg. Baen and Phoenix Picks and I'm sure many others) Think what a pain it would be to have to go to different on line stores for each different publisher when you want to buy books. Again not disimilar to music; there is nothing stopping the record labels from selling their music downloads direct but people will still go to places like iTunes where they can get everything in one place.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

And what happens to our books when the reader we have becomes obsolete and is no longer supported? Will we have a collection of books that we can't reread ... unless we re-buy them in the new format?

What is convenient about that?

 

[Captain Campion]

And what happens to our books when the reader we have becomes obsolete and is no longer supported? Will we have a collection of books that we can't reread ... unless we re-buy them in the new format?

What is convenient about that?

Good point but, I suppose, the evolution of VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray provides some guidance in how things could develop, although I believe electronic files will be a lot easier to make compatible with new hardware as those changes come along.

 

[Vertigo]

And what happens to our books when the reader we have becomes obsolete and is no longer supported? Will we have a collection of books that we can't reread ... unless we re-buy them in the new format?

Essentially no you would simply upload them to your new eReader. That said there are currently some issue around that made worse by Amazon's adoption of their own format - Kindle downloads can only be played on Kindles. All other manufacturers have pretty much settled on the standard ePub format; any book in this format can be read on any machine (except Kindles!). Apple tried the same sort of thing with their own music format that could only be played on iPods. This ultimately failed and now music downloads are pretty much all one format; MP3. The same will happen with eBooks I am certain. As that standard is developed eReaders will inevitably be backwards compatible so your old formats will still be perfectly readable. Just as I can still read a Micrsoft Word document from the earliest days of Windows.

The real pain at the moment is DRM "security". Again this was tried by the music industry and has ultimately been abandoned. The same will happen in the book industry I'm sure; a number of publishers are already providing their books DRM free and have reported no loss of sales eg. Baen and Phoenix Picks (an imprint of Arc Manor). OK maybe not the biggest publishers in the world but an indication of the way forward. This is no surprise because ultimately, DRM or no eBooks, can be pirated very easily; any software security system will always be circumvented somehow by those determined to do so. I currently strip the DRM from each book I buy and convert any Kindle (AZW) format books to ePub (if I had a Kindle I would do it in the opposite direction). This is a bit of a pain, yes, but takes considerably less time than going to a book shop to buy my book and really doesn't take much more time than unwrapping a book that I have received by post. Technically what I'm doing is not legal but I do buy all the books that I do it to and consider it to be asserting my rights as the purchaser to choose how I will read them.

Even hard copy does not protect the publishers from this piracy; you wouldn't believe how many books have been scanned - yes every single page scanned and OCR'r into digital text - and then uploaded for people to download (read steal) for free. Name almost any book written in the last 50 years or so and I could probably find a "free" download of a scanned copy of it for you. I'm not saying this is right, proper or moral but it happens. The bottom line is that things like DRM cause hassle for the buyers and the publishers and really achieves very little. I expect it to be dropped eventually. The reality is that people determined to pirate will always find a way of doing it, honest people will always be prepared to pay a reasonable price for what they buy.

I'm not saying the transition will be painless, particularly for the publishers maybe, but in the end I think it is an inevitable future.

Obsolescence of readers is inevitable but obsolescence of your actual book files should never be an issue. Incidentally you can always re-download your ebooks so you loose nothing even if your eReader is lost or stolen. I can't say all, but certainly all the major sellers like Amazon, Waterstones, WH Smiths etc. keep a record of the books you have bought and you can re-download them to your registered device at any time (and I have done so just to check it works!). That said I keep all mine backed up anyway - it's automatic on my system.

 

[J Riff]

I already have various freeware converters- PDF to .Lit, Sony to this, Kindle to that.... now all I need is a reader. I estimate two yrs. before they start showing up in thrift stores, they are already sitting in pawn shops everywhere.

 

[Null_Zone]

Looking at the prices of Kindle books this is easy enough to why assuming the number are accurate.

I've been reading alot of cheap horror and Sci-fi, most of it pretty bad but for £1 a copy it's hard to complain. I've paid £8.99 for worse on occasion so a 1:9 chance is pretty good of stumbling on something worthwhile. So whilst I'm still buying the same number of history and more standard fiction it's hard to resist cheap books that will probably be terrible but you never know.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

As that standard is developed eReaders will inevitably be backwards compatible so your old formats will still be perfectly readable. Just as I can still read a Micrsoft Word document from the earliest days of Windows.

I'm on a Mac, and there are a lot of my old files that I can't read. They aren't Word files, though. I've just started using Word for some things, and I dislike it excessively, but you may have just pointed out a feature I could learn to love as time passes and I have older Word files that I want to open.

But ... the reason I use Word now is because I do freelance editing and I have to be able to work with other people's files, which are almost inevitably Word files. Of course some of us have newer versions of Word than others, and when I open some of those files a window pops up saying that I might lose some information opening that file. So far, that hasn't happened, but I assume that there are situations where that does happen between older and newer versions of Word — or else why the window and the warning?

When was the last time you opened one of those old, old documents?

 

[Parson]

I'm on a Mac, and there are a lot of my old files that I can't read. They aren't Word files, though. I've just started using Word for some things, and I dislike it excessively, but you may have just pointed out a feature I could learn to love as time passes and I have older Word files that I want to open.

But ... the reason I use Word now is because I do freelance editing and I have to be able to work with other people's files, which are almost inevitably Word files. Of course some of us have newer versions of Word than others, and when I open some of those files a window pops up saying that I might lose some information opening that file. So far, that hasn't happened, but I assume that there are situations where that does happen between older and newer versions of Word — or else why the window and the warning?

When was the last time you opened one of those old, old documents?

I'm amazed about the Mac. I would have thought with all of Apple's proprietary software that this would never happen.

I too deal with a lot of attachments and have installed Word 2007 out of self defense, I suppose soon I'll have to update again. But what I can't understand is why we don't all send pdf attachments? Any Word Processor worth its salt can make one. In your case TE, I suppose they want you to insert into the text and that would make Adobe Pagemaker (A real high end program!) necessary. Mine are almost always the "How does this sound?" "Is this what we meant?" variety.

 

[Vertigo]

Teresa, I also am a little surprised by what you say about the Mac. I would have expected them to be better than that.

I have only tried documents back to the earliest Windows versions and I would anticipate more problems (and likely complete failure) with pre windows formats like Wordstar, Wordperfect etc.

However there is a huge difference with the ePub format (unlike Amazon's proprietary AZW for Kindles) and that is that it is an open international standard rather than a proprietary format:

EPUB became an official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in September 2007, superseding the older Open eBook standard.

Unfortunately with proprietary formats there is much less motivation to rigorously support earlier versions. However with something like eBooks, for exactly the reasons you originally mentioned, it would be frankliy criminal to bring out a new standard that did not support the old. And ePub is also based on XHTML another international open standard.

 

[nj1]

I don't know if i'm off the mark here but I would say that the high sales of e-book are likely due to the people who bought kindle are likely stock-piling books on they're devices. I have an old e-reader somewhere and when new i rushed off to download books just to be able to show everyone how many books i had and was able to add to the device. ofcourse it took me agaes to read the ones i bought and eventually went back to paper. now i've reverted back to PB my buying has slowed down to 1-2 books per month. I'm not saying everyones like me but once the novelty of downloading books wears off the sales may likely drop to a more realistic rate.

 

[Cayal]

Gonna be harder to spy what others are reading and judge them thusly.

 

[Parson]

Teresa, I also am a little surprised by what you say about the Mac. I would have expected them to be better than that.

I have only tried documents back to the earliest Windows versions and I would anticipate more problems (and likely complete failure) with pre windows formats like Wordstar, Wordperfect etc.

However there is a huge difference with the ePub format (unlike Amazon's proprietary AZW for Kindles) and that is that it is an open international standard rather than a proprietary format:



Unfortunately with proprietary formats there is much less motivation to rigorously support earlier versions. However with something like eBooks, for exactly the reasons you originally mentioned, it would be frankliy criminal to bring out a new standard that did not support the old. And ePub is also based on XHTML another international open standard.

I have been running a Word Perfect program since 1989 --- I know that's longer than some of our posters have been alive --- But for this thread it is significant. I can access all of my old WP files, I think all the way back to DOS 3.3 days. But if memory serves me right I did update them once so that may not be as significant as I think. Also WP can (or perhaps I should say will) deal with all the Word files up to the date of the program you are presently using. I can always save a Word file, but in Word I can't save a WP file ---- frustrating for sure.

Using this as a basis, I would guess that if Kindle winds up totally winning the e-reader war then we will get an Apple situation. But if "all the others" hold their own it will be more like VHS.

 

[Fried Egg]

I'm afraid whether you like it or not ebooks will be the future of reading. To deny this is to put yourself in the same camp as people that said "talkie movies" would never take off.

You make a powerful case but I don't think the demise of paper books is quite as innevitable as that. Technology is also working in favour of paper books because printing is becoming easier and cheaper. Coupled with the digitisation of book content, paper books can continue to be sold on a "print on demand" basis indefinitely. They may end up being more expensive than ebooks but I would have thought they would continue to be available to those who choose to buy them. If the costs of printing individual books continues to fall, it shouldn't matter how small a minority are people like me who are willing to support them.

Long live the paperback book!

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Long live, indeed, but this thread worries me...

 

[Null_Zone]

Gonna be harder to spy what others are reading and judge them thusly.

As shown by the increase in Mills & Boon sales.