I’ll admit that I would have thought a few years ago that by the time we got to the point when more than a third of unit sales for major houses had gone digital — and perhaps more than half for fiction — that the future shape of the book business would be discernible. But, […]
eBook sales comparisons to print aren’t always what they seem
When Amazon talks about how ebooks are selling in relation to print books, as they did again this week, they are comparing apples to apples. They are comparing what their customers bought in digital form versus what they bought in print in any given period of time. When PW or the AAP or even the […]
Where do we lose the shelf space and how much do we lose?
There are two questions about the impact of digital change on publishing that are just about impossible to answer. One is: how much of the sale of ebooks is incremental business and how much of it is cannibalization of prior print sales? The other is: what will be the fate of independent bookstores? The two […]
Lots going on; no single topic today
I find myself with a lot of pages open on my web browser. Even before Amazon’s announcement yesterday about ebooks passing hardcovers in sales this past quarter, there has been a lot going on. There had been some suggestions, which I never bought into, that ebook sales were slowing in 2009. (Is this a meme […]
Two anomalies on my desk this morning
While the AAP reports that US book sales are definitely down and my friends in major houses report a decline of 10% or more across the board, that’s not what we’re hearing from Canada and it’s not what we hard from small and midsize publishers responding to our BISG “Shifting Sales Channels” survey. BookNet Canada […]