Just hanging out with Mommy and Daddy while drying off.
The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist
The books business
Great digital expectationsDigitisation may have came late to book publishing, but it is transforming the business in short order
Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition
The offline experience
TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.
In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.
In this section
- Spine chilling
- Left to their own devices
- All charged up for sharing
- The offline experience
That has meant higher prices for many new e-books. As some prices rise, though, a tide of free and cheap product is flooding the market. Self-published novelists, keen for attention and without agents or publishers to share the proceeds with, often sell their works extremely cheaply. Meanwhile publishers have moved to offer introductory discounts on some books. As a result, Amazon’s list of 100 best-selling books has become a pricing free-for-all. This week 21 books were selling for just 99 cents. Others were priced at $4.98, $7.59 and $8.82. The most expensive single book, at $16.99, was Dick Cheney’s memoir. There is none of the clarity of iTunes in its early years, when the price of music tracks was fixed at 99 cents.
Publishers point out that books have always sold for a wide variety of different prices. Hardback books cost more than high-quality paperbacks, which cost more than small, mass-market paperbacks—and everything is more expensive than a dog-eared library book. But those books are physically different from each other. E-books all look the same. And the popularity of those 99-cent thrillers suggests readers are more price-sensitive, and less quality-sensitive, than publishers care to admit.
Another problem is Amazon’s market dominance. The firm accounts for less than a quarter of physical book sales (see box). But Amazon sells 60-70% of e-books in America and perhaps 90% in Britain, according to estimates by Enders Analysis, a British outfit. In America, Barnes & Noble’s Nook is the main competitor. Surprisingly, given the success of the iPad, Apple’s iBookstore has lagged. James McQuivey of Forrester Research found in a survey that only half of iPad owners read e-books—and two-thirds of them own or plan to buy an e-reader especially for the purpose. Amazon appears set to launch a tablet computer to take on the iPad. And Amazon is becoming a publisher in its own right. It has a romance imprint, and has signed big writers like Timothy Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”. This tightens its grip over the e-book market.
A book in the window
Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.
Efforts are under way. This week a British outfit called aNobii released a trial version of a website that it hopes will become a Wikipedia-style community of book lovers, with an option to buy. The idea has potential. Amazon’s recommendation engine, although helpful, is rather impersonal—perhaps the retailer’s second-biggest weakness, after the resentment publishers feel for it.
The book business has long been suffused with gloom; Mr Osnos says that booksellers have faced five or six supposedly fatal challenges during his career. But this time the challenges are really daunting. Publishers have to confront many of the problems that have afflicted other media industries that have gone digital, as well as a few entirely new ones. The next few years will be a thriller.
from the print edition | Business
via economist.com
More interesting commentary on the e-book revolution. My personal thoughts are that publishers still don't understand that customers want to pay for content, but only at a fair price. $16.99 for the Kindle version when I could buy the hardcover for $17.50 is a rip off, plain and simple.
$9.99 is the magic point, but publishers don't want to admit that Amazon was right all along.
Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world - YouTube
via youtube.com
Suggested video from my Finance Professor. Very interesting take on algorithmic trading on the Stock Market, and how it affected the crash in 2008.
Exclusive: Rental & Used Textbooks Cheaper Than Digital 92% of the Time
While digital textbooks are typically more affordable than new paper books, one analysis suggests that price alone might not be enough to sway customers toward digital when rental and used books are on the market.
The analysis, which was conducted by textbook price comparison site campusbooks.com, compared prices for 1,000 textbook titles across the site’s 12 partner textbook rental companies, 35 partner used book retailers and seven partner digital textbook creators. It found that for about 81% of these books, renting a paper version was the cheapest available option. Used paper book prices beat out rental fees about 11% of the time, and ebooks, which like rentals are usually sold for use during a 130- or 180-day period, had the most affordable price in about 8% of cases.
While the saved costs of physical manufacturing and shipping make price an advertised selling point for many etextbook retailers, a student who is making purchasing decisions based solely on cost will likely find a better deal elsewhere.
Campusbooks.com CEO Jeff Cohen says that prices across all book formats shift frequently and that etextbooks tend to become the cheapest option for a given title when used books are harder to find.
“There’s definitely not a clear winner of who is cheapest all the time,” Cohen says.
Used books get cheaper every time they are sold, and rental companies can keep prices even lower by purchasing used books to rent.
Meanwhile, to publishers’ delight, there is no equivalent rental market for digital books. This means that every time a student purchases a digital book, the publisher gets paid. But it also means that until the number of students choosing digital books starts to eat into the availability of used books, it’s unlikely that ebooks will be the cheapest option the majority of the time.
Photo courtesy of istockphoto, dlewis33
via mashable.com
I thought that e-books would change the textbook industry. Now I realize that it will take a new generation of instructors, who want flexibility, customization, and the ability to instantly update their materials to demand a new platform for textbooks.
Maybe in a few years all this will change for the better for students. I'd much rather carry around one Kindle than have to lug four 5 lb. textbooks in a backpack.
Ginger's Can't Be Pirates - YouTube
via youtube.com
Poor baby Emmy is stirring up many emotions around our house with her reddish (I won't use the 'G' word) hair. Eden thinks we'll need to cover her up with a pirate style bandana. Thoughts?
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