Where t is the time variable, counted by months, and k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) equal in this case to $130 Million. The constant k is also the assumed value of ebook sales at the inflection point in the graph.
Using fractions of pi — (π/80) above — is how we “stretch” the s-curve to match the observed growth over time. My first projection used (π/60), an assumed dynamic growth phase of about 120 months. To get the projected graph to match reported sales, however, I had to slow things down a bit — (π/80) translates to a “dynamic” phase of 160 months, about 13 years. For the graph below, our starting point (t=0) is the month of August, 2005.
This also means we hit the inflection point back in May 2012.
[/tl;dr-math]
My [*] on the Projected Sales is the same disclaimer as last time:
The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
…however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)
##
Now, some new thoughts:
First, I need to see the next 4 months of data (Jan-Feb-Mar-Apr 2013) to see if there is a bounce in Early 2013, just like there was in 2011 and 2012 (corresponding to new owners of devices buying content, aka the post-Christmas-Gift Bounce)
Second,
How about we turn this around? Let’s say my projection of ebook growth was correct up through 2011 (and presumably beyond) and it’s the data in 2012 that was in some way “wrong” or skewed?
Let’s Just Guess that publishers’ reported ebook sales numbers in May-June-July-August of 2012 were affected by Fifty Shades of Grey. Random House reported profits (not sales, Profits) were up 75% year-over-year due to the 50 Shades phenomenon, and additionally, “About 50% of revenues from the trilogy were from ebooks”. It’s going to be very hard to parse that 50% number and compare it to the 70 Million ‘copies’ sold, and also to go from there to the actual number of readers: How many people bought just the first book? How many ebooks sold were the 3 volume “box set”, and do the box sets count as one book or three? How does the cost of printing figure into the calculation of “revenue” — does the lower price point mean ebooks sold More Than Half, or does the slimmer profit margin on An Actual Printed Book mean that ebooks sold Less?edit: actual number at about 15 Million. see end note “update2” and also ref the PW article here.
50 Shades was a definite outlier, though, no matter the number: the “downturn” in AAP-reported ebook sales toward the end of 2012 is at least in part an expected correction.
I want to say there is more to that story, though.
I’d say the numbers Sep-Dec 2012 also show that the established publishers are losing (additional) ground to self-publishing and authors using direct-to-e-book platforms like iBooks, KDP, and Nook Press.
Just like the ebooks-as-a-format saw steady growth before suddenly tearing off in 2010 — following the “mainstreaming” of ereaders and tablets, when there finally was a market — self-published ebooks are going to follow the same trajectory now that there is a “mainstream” market:
At least 5 Million readers (and maybe twice that or more) bought the 50 Shades ebooks — A huge chunk of readers have been turned onto a “new” genre, erotic fiction [a genre that was already fairly extensive, almost entirely online, and that predates ebooks-as-we-currently-define-them by at least a decade].
There were also stories all over the place in 2012 (in papers, in magazines, online and on TV) reporting on 50 Shades and its origin as a self-published book — the success of E. L. James has removed most (if not quite all) of the stigma of self-publishing, and other authors like John Locke and Amanda Hocking, both of whom have built readerships across multiple books and over years, are proving that it’s not just a one-time special exception: Self Publishing can work.
The gap between AAP-reported data and my projection? It was about $5-10 Million per month in the 2011 (excluding January spikes) — but now (after 50 shades) we’re looking at $25-30 Million per month in September 2012, and perhaps $40-50 Million per month by the end of the year.
I feel confident in my projection — though I’m also leaning heavily toward adjusting the projection once I get more data. And if Apple, Amazon, or B&N want to get off of their secrecy kick and could maybe just tell us how big digital self publishing is: well, that’d be just fine by me, too.
It may be a full year from now (when we have all of 2013 numbers, and no curveballs thrown) before we can know which of the data points are outliers. I plan to update the chart every 4 months, as the data comes in.
[update1, 5:45pm 13 April 2013]
An extra little bit of math for you: Monthly Sales of $50 Million in ebooks divided by an average price point of $2.99 per book, divided by 30 days in a month, would be half a million self published ebooks sold and downloaded every single day.
Question for the class: Is that number too high, or too low?
[/update1]
“Fifty Shades sold over 15 million digital copies, while the Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle sold over 850,000 e-books. RH had another 1 million–copy e-book seller in Gone Girl.”
More math: 16 Million ebooks (rounding up) vs 54 Million print books — and as reported ebooks accounted for 50% of the revenue. If all other production costs have been covered (as I assume they were after the first half-million or so sold) then a digitally-delivered ebook is at least 3 times as profitable as An Actual Printed Book — please note that when one has to actually cover the production costs, and pay an author advance, there is going to be a much different calculus involved — and I’ll leave the question of how the differing price points affect the calculation as an exercise for the student
[/update2]
[update3]minor edits made 9:30pm 14 April 2013[/update3]
[update4]minor edits & format changes, additional links added, 7:50pm 14 April 2013[/update4]
Brigid Alverson (whom I’ve never met but know on twitter) has an excellent write-up currently posted to Publisher’s Weekly on the current state of the American manga industry: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/56693-manga-2013-a-smaller-more-sustainable-market.html
I was first informed of this excellent article via the equally excellent comics-news blog The Beat [aka comicsbeat.com] : http://comicsbeat.com/must-read-shocker-there-is-still-a-us-manga-industry/
And now that I’m done thanking others for their hard work and excellent journalistic instincts —
[no, really, what I do here is much easier; being in the peanut gallery is not only less work, we get to pick-and-choose when it comes to predictions]
…I’d like to take a moment to congratulate myself for posting this way back in 2008:
[blockquote] Manga isn’t growing by leaps and bounds anymore; it never was a license to print money and now the initial boom (which I’ve dated to 2004-2007, though others say it started earlier) is settling into something more like steady single-digit [year-on-year] growth.
Steady single-digit growth isn’t just good, it’s excellent. We all need to get our heads to a place where we can agree on that, instead of obsessing over what the fan world used to look like and lamenting the crash of the anime DVD market. It’s a shame, that, but manga isn’t anime and with Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan all partnered-up (or getting into the game themselves) the books will be available for quite some time.
quick review for those who haven’t been reading my stuff for the past year:
Between the 5 of them, these companies account for about half of the US book business. [48.8% – Source: Michael Hyatt, Dec 2006] Each of the 5 also acts as their own distributor, shipping new titles direct to book stores. Since not everyone is going to know this off the top of their head
We can discuss which third tier (or major) manga publisher is going to go under or is struggling or might not meet their deadlines (or has never met their deadlines) but at $10 a pop and with this much publishing muscle behind it, manga as a category isn’t going anywhere.
Steady single-digit, year-on-year growth is a Great place to be.
Got it?
Random House still has an excellent business relationship with Kodansha, and Vertical, and distributes DC Comics to bookstores besides. While Del Rey is merely one of the top 3 sci-fi/fantasy/spec. fic. imprints with a much reduced comics line-up: Del Rey is One Of the Top 3 Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Spec. Fic. imprints, and Kodansha in direct control of those US manga licences hasn’t been a bad thing either.
HarperCollins, if someone at corporate had been paying attention, could have launched a whole YA Graphic Novels imprint into the hole Tokyopop left, using the Warriors GNs as a base and other nee-HC-Tokyopop titles as a built-in backlist. Huge Missed Opportunity, guys.
I think the Scholastic Graphix imprint is another big deal in this space – yes, obviously manga is a bigger market than just YA/Teen — but just like pop/rock music: tweens and teens are the manga market leaders and the biggest growth opportunity.
I also want to encourage Seven Seas. Damn. You guys are tenacious – whatever keeps things running over there: please keep doing it. I don’t buy all your books but I love that you’re still in business.
I pointed this out 3 years ago but I think it might be time for another “the Emperor is wearing no clothes” moment.
Many of the partisans on all sides of the larger ebooks vs bookstores vs publishers vs authors vs Amazon debate get caught up on just one side or another of the love-hate-polygon.
“I’m a Kindle Direct author and I’m making 5 figures a year after a decade of publisher rejections – publishers suck!”
“As a small press, we’re holding out against Amazon and the big six while still pushing into bookstore chains and the indies — while also marketing online. Authors: we’re in your corner”
“Here: read our books for free – we know you’ll buy them, or the sequels, and how is an e-book sample different from plucking and reading copy off the bookstore shelf?”
“I encourage you to read and buy the books I’ve reviewed: if you choose to buy, please conisder using the affiliate links on my page (it’s like leaving a tip!)”
“My local bookstore closed, so I’m never shopping bookstores again. Amaazon FTW“
“Amazon put my local bookstore out of business, so while I have to shop online now I’m going used, ebay, and Indie“
##
Here’s the thing:
The common ebook formats are just XML/XHTML and CSS packages of your plain text. No, really. The only complications are ‘proprietary’ formats that implement varying degrees of DRM. Otherwise: it’s all open source web pages, basically. If you’re already writing for a browser, there’s no need to go out of your way to ‘optimize’ for e-readers: when you already have the web, you don’t need Amazon to publish.
What you need Amazon for is access to a market: 200 million or so readers who already browse and buy online. But don’t conflate Amazon’s user base with Amazon. If you buy into the KDP (or other “publishing” platforms; Amazon/Kindle is largest, so sees the most converts) — you’re just admitting that this Captured Market is more important to you than reaching out to all readers.
I get it. It’s easy.
Not only did they build up the reader base – they handed you a key. Sure: it’s easier to game a system that only serves a small subset of super-avid readers, those who read dozens of books each month — rather than risk putting yourself out there for the market to decide your worth. Most folks only read one book a year. One in four read no books at all.
But don’t tell me that your mastery of the online-tutorial-levels of publishing means you’ve “won the game” and the rest of publishing is superfluous. What’s the real differentiator? How do we know which e-books are truly the winners? And does an Online success necessarily mean the same book won’t also succeed in bookstores?
Amazon wrote your book for you? Amazon created the fan base?
You’re telling me steampunk, lycan, faerie and fey and otherkin, and the various and ever expanding vampire fandoms, plus dozens more fandoms I’m thankfully ignorant of – none of these existed before Amazon? Or that none of these fandoms existed before the Kindle?
I totally get that signing up for KDP is easy — and if you’ve already written something and have either felt slighted or completely ignored by the current publishing industry — Amazon seems like your savior. Just remember: the web has already given you all you need to ‘publish’ a book. Indeed, ebooks are nothing but web pages — and web pages can do a lot more, if you’d care to try.
So long as the data can be found (sadly, the AAP no longer does their own press releases; thankfully, other sources with access to BookStats do post the monthly ebook numbers) I’ll continue to update the graph.
I’d also like to remind the folks at AAP/BISG/bookstats.org that posts to RocketBomber.com are available freely under a Non-commercial CC license: they are welcome to include my analysis (or adaptations of my analysis) in their own reports. I’ll even waive the non-commercial requirement (which would be a sticking point, since they charge big bucks for the data now) so long as they still include an attribution. You share with us, I share with you, new things get created, new analysis and viewpoints proliferate: internet!
Where t is the time variable, counted by months, and k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) equal in this case to $130 Million. The constant k is also the assumed value of ebook sales at the inflection point in the graph.
Using fractions of pi — (π/80) above — is how we “stretch” the s-curve to match the observed growth over time. My first projection used (π/60), an assumed dynamic growth phase of about 120 months. To get the projected graph to match reported sales, however, I had to slow things down a bit — (π/80) translates to a “dynamic” phase of 160 months, about 13 years. For the graph below, our starting point (t=0) is the month of August, 2005.
This also means we hit the inflection point back in May, 6 months ago.
[/tl;dr-math]
My [*] on the Projected Sales is the same disclaimer as last time:
The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
…however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)
As data becomes available, I’m happy to post future updates. I think the next e-book sales projection will be after the Jan-Feb ebooks sales numbers go public — covering this fall plus the post-holiday-ereaders-given-as-gifts bump we’ve seen in years past. I’m guessing that will be in May, about 5-6 months from now.
Yes, ebooks are a disruptive force in book retail and publishing.
Yes, ebooks represent a new distribution model with many new benefits and advantages.
Since then, another whole year of data is available, including both the holidays and the post holiday ebook binge associated with recipients filling newly-gifted gadgets with content.
Of course, this kind of analysis has certain limitations:
The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
…however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)
Let’s look at the numbers anyway:
This graph is a little different from the one I posted last year, even though it looks similar. Growth is occuring more slowly than I assumed last year, so I had to “stretch” my graph a bit to fit. (Instead of a ten year overall time frame, this one is twelve years.) The other adjustment was more surprising: the estimate for where monthly ebook sales will eventually ‘top out’ and reach equilibrium went down by about $50 Million.
If the new projection is more accurate, we’ll see average monthly ebook sales of $250 Million rather than $300 Million – and we’ll hit the midpoint of the sigmoid curve before the end of the year.
This isn’t a tipping point in quite the way you think. Growth is still going to be quite dramatic through 2013 and 2014, and the data is messy enough that even as we approach equilibirum in mid-2015, it’s still going to look like growth.
For centuries before the steam-powered printing press, books were rare: to be scrounged for in small shops, bought used more often than not, each a treasure, and each treasured.
I don’t think most people [the ones who only buy one book a year] understand the bibliophile’s need for books, or the comfort of a personal library full of them.
Digital is fine. Ebooks can be exceptionally convenient. The ebook may eventually supplant certain types of cheap paperback; in fact is already doing so. I also hope the ease of ‘production’, ‘printing’, and distribution ushers in a new Age of Pulp.
(scifi is chugging along fine, but certain types of adventure & mystery stories could use a shot in the arm.)
However: there’s nothing like a book, a physical book in hand with some serious heft, to soothe one’s soul and decorate one’s house. And you can read them! Amazing things.
This is something basic I and many others understand. We were already buying books (much more than one a year) and after the general public’s fling with digital books: we’ll still be buying them. You can predict the death of the bookstore chains, and of the big publishers, and that’s fine. It may even be true. But even when the damn things were made by hand – there was an unquenchable demand for actual books that centuries of writing, printing, and constant reproduction of older titles did nothing to slake.
Books will be scrounged for in small shops, bought used more often than not: each a treasure, and each treasured.
Industrial Bookselling doesn’t have an exact date we can point to as an origin — though if I had to pick a year, it would be 1931 and the inception of the paperback — which then languished for a bit until business models caught up to technology. [I leave the direct comparison of paperbacks to ebooks as an exercise for the student; pull quote from wikipedia: “then-huge print runs of 20,000 copies to keep unit prices low”]
The lower price points caught on with a penny-conscious consumer (there was a recession on) and slowly the new format was fully embraced by readers — but even before consumption patterns (and resultant residual persistent demand) were apparent, whole new genres of books made possible by cheaper production costs and concommitant lower barriers of entry appeared [once again, I leave the direct comparison to ebooks as an exercise for the student; pull quote from wikipedia: “While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people.”]
Decades before the first nationwide chains, technology opened up publishing in both directions: both downward in price, and laterally — across publishers, genres, and markets. Books were available on racks at newsstands and drugstores; books became a popular entertainment, and not just the purview of the literati.
So — important point — prior to the chains, there was demand: massively increased demand fueled by the cheaper format and many new genres enabled by new technology. At the same time, larger societal changes [a century-long shift away from the general store, town square, and mail-order catalog toward shopping ‘malls’ and strip centers and other car-enabled options] were apparent in the ways we shopped for everything, not just books.
Seen in both the larger context of retail [regional shopping centres] and publishing [paperbacks enabling a new rennaisance] the emergence of nationwide book store chains in the 60s was a given. Obvious. Well, obvious to folks like me.
(I’d link direct to a wikipedia entry for Bookstop/Bookstar, but for whatever reason the company has been de-wiki’d and re-directs to Barnes & Noble’s entry, with absolutely no mention of Bookstar — note: at one point a national chain, an Austin-based company with it’s own history and which contributed to the book-superstore-concept B&N leveraged to nationwide prominence. In fact, one could argue that before 1989, B&N was a college bookstore chain trying to figure out how to expand, and that Bookstar was the catalyst that differentiated B&N from, say, Follets — with multi-billion-dollar consequences. Guess that’s not ‘relevant’ enough for wikipedia.)
And starting 15 to 20 years ago, the independents (and Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, too) were about to discover what a major chain really is: while a number of firms (Crown, Powell’s, BookStop, even Barnes & Noble at the time) were opening up ‘discount’ bookstores — warehouse stores full of current bestsellers on sale, remainders, and other discounted titles — this isn’t necessarily what the public wanted; or rather, not everything we wanted. B&N took the downtown New York bookstore and cloned it, throwing up huge boxes in suburbs and smaller cities across the U.S., selling us books and coffee and CDs and most importantly: atmosphere. Other chains quickly followed suit, re-purposing old brand names and converting the discount store of the 80s into the Book SuperStore of today.
B&N wasn’t necessarily first: lucky urbanites have long had such superior bookstores as City Lights, the Strand, or Powell’s City of Books — and the best of the indies are arguably better than yet another cookie-cutter box out by the mall. The point isn’t that the BigBoxBookstore is better, the amazing thing is that they’re everywhere. (Well, almost everywhere; my apologies if you don’t live near one, or if your local is in danger of closing)
Collectively B&N, Borders, and Books-a-Million operate 1500 or so outlets that are touted as superstores, and if we add in another 100? or so large independent (often landmark) bookstores then there are more places to actually find and hold, even read, a book then ever before. Obscure titles, novels, reference, classics, even comics — hundreds of thousands of titles. It’s a great time to be a bookseller, and reader. It’s a great time to be alive.
In the 20th (let alone the 21st) century, it’s impossible to run a ‘local’ bookstore. There are at least six million books in print, and at least another 12 million books available used — and if you can’t quite wrap your brain around that: your local grocery store carries at most 60,000 SKUs — so a bookstore has to manage 200 to 300 times as many items as a supermarket, and no other retailer comes anywhere close to that number of items stocked. It’s not only ridiculous, it’s impossible.
Bookstore inventory management was only made possible by computers. In this one case, “industrial” practices were only enabled by information revolutions. Perhaps it is because book retail is removed twice from production: once, because demand must be communicated from customer to retailer (assuming the customer even knows they want something: there is no demand without knowledge) and twice, as publishers produced books in expectation of demand, without knowing for sure if this year’s slate was in fact what the reader wanted. The Major Leap made in the 70s [made by Borders, in fact] was to apply analysis to sales and tailor stock in local stores to fit.
Computerized inventory drove sales across all chains through the 80s and into the early 90s, when major players parlayed their success and segment knowledge into the New Big Box Bookstores. It seemed bulletproof: build upon years of sales data across authors, publishers, and book genres to stock shelves in new footprints two-to-five-times the size of existing bookstores, with expected increases in profits.
What the chains ignored (or perhaps, did not realise) is that their computerized models could be used to build computer-only bookstores. Amazon showed up in 1995 and proceeded to eat everyone’s lunch.
[It wasn’t guaranteed: Amazon didn’t report an annual profit until 2003 — they had 8 years of ‘free passes’ from investors and honestly, I don’t know why. Any other company, even a dot-com 2.0 start-up, would have been closed after 5 years of losses and sold for parts. 98% of Amazon’s success has to be attributed to ‘being in the right place at the right time’]
My complaints about Amazon aside: they show that advanced computerized inventory models can serve physical bookstores very well — but that computer models best serve web retailers even better.
Decades of bookselling, advances in inventory management, hand sales and impassioned bookselling, market expansion and careful curation of niche markets – all this just fed into Amazon, and the new [parasitic] model that was determined to put us out of business.
Amazon is a parasite. Sure, they prosper while the whole organism [Books, publishing, book retail, and impassioned handselling] prospers, but they provide nothing to enable the organism to grow. Amazon does everything I can do, but better — but also, only in a derivative, [dare I say, stolen] second-hand way. When both Borders and Barnes & Noble are gone — will Amazon really be able to fill the void?
The whole industry is in flux, no one knows exactly what is going on…
Well… unless they are students of history and looked at the last format change: the introduction of paperbacks in 1931.
The new format that threatened to overturn publishing was, in fact, thoroughly adopted – and subsequently expanded commercial publishing into new markets, new genres, and to new heights.
My bookstore may, in fact, die. [not looking forward to it] But ‘bookselling’ seems to be an activity independent of actual sales; if Amazon doesn’t recognize the skill or chooses to to ignore it, well, I have a Plan B.
I’ve been tracking these numbers for a while. Obviously, the big headline is about the growth of the ebook format; here’s what the chart looks like with the latest
[image: ebook baseline]
I think we can all see a trend. It’s not quite exponential growth; that would be even more dramatic of an upward trend. In fact, I tried to graph it — messing around with numbers, seeing if there was a formula I could use to predict ebook sales. [a fool’s errand, but once I started playing with the math I was having too much fun to quite let the idea go.]
Eventually, it occurred to me to try looking for other mathematic models, beside 2x or some other exponent in the formula. Eventually I remembered sigmoid functions and after playing around with a few of these I hit the operator that produced a best-fit curve. Thankfully, it was not only blessedly simple — tanh(x) — but also something that is supported by OpenOffice Calc.
[image: bestfitcurve]
The original data is messy, and this is an awfully small sample, but hey – I’m just playing with numbers. I ended up with
ebook(t)=k * (1 + tanh(t))
Where k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) and t is the time variable. t, in my graph above, is counted off in units of [roughly] π/60, and t=-π at some arbitrary point in the past —in this case, November of 2006: one year before the kindle came out.
After all the trial and error to squeeze the math into the data I had, it turns out these have some meaning: constant k is equal to sales at the inflection point of the curve, and as such is roughly 1/2 of ‘equilibrium’ sales, and by counting in units of π/60, we’re looking at the dynamic part of the graph [tanh(-π) to tanh(π)] over the course of 10 years [120 months]
So those were my assumptions – and the function used – and I like this graph.
Even using the same math — the exact same function — one can mess with the constant and time variable though, to make a very similar graph
[image: projection2]
that at first blush seems to be the same. In this case, instead of t=-π at Nov 2006, I pushed it forward to t=-π at Nov 2007 — in effect saying the growth in ebooks didn’t really start until a year later. To make the new graph fit the same numbers, I had to change my constant k.
That’s hard to see above, but let me project both graphs out to 2015.
[image: to 2015]
The red line, my first projection, shows ebook sales perhaps hitting $200 Million a month as early as January of 2013. At this point, ebook sales would constitute about half of all book sales (currently at an average of about $575 Million a month for trade books, at least over the past 5 years — a number that includes ebooks) and that soon after, the growth of ebooks would level off.
Using the same function but with different assumptions (the yellow line) you can see that ebook sales will continue to grow almost out of control, increasing by about $100 Million every sixth months through 2012 and 2013, and not really levelling off until 2016. At that point, ebook sales would be $750-$800 Million each month – about 50% bigger than the entire current trade book market, all by itself.
Please note I only included the second projection to show how the math can be manipulated, and that even the models that seem to fit the available data can also be made to fit someone’s assumptions and conclusions.
That said, I think the available data does in fact support a modelled sigmoid growth curve, which means ebook sales will eventually level off. When, and at what level, is the hard part to figure out.
To me this only makes sense, as there will be a natural saturation point — everyone who wants an ebook reader (or who already owns a smartphone or computer) will have one, and everyone who wants to read ebooks will be doing so. The market for ebooks can’t grow past a certain level, except of course as all markets naturally grow given inflation and growth of population.
At any rate, I think we’ll have enough data in one year’s time to be able to better model the ebook market. I’ll save this spreadsheet and break it out again when we have another six to eight months of sales data.
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.
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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.
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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.]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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”
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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.
Manga isn’t growing by leaps and bounds anymore; it never was a license to print money and now the initial boom (which I’ve dated to 2004-2007, though others say it started earlier) is settling into something more like steady single-digit [year-on-year] growth.
