This post is the second that is contemplating two big questions facing the publishing industry: When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop? Who will be left standing when it does? Amazon applies pressure and generates angst among publishers from two directions. As they grow to be 30% or more […]
By one benchmark at least, we are probably halfway through the (r)evolution
A couple of major (Big Six) publishers have acknowledged that ebook revenues for them have passed 20% of their revenues. Of the 80% that remains print, I think it would be conservative to estimate that 20% of that is sold online. That’s an additional 16 percent of their business. Adding those together tells us that, for at […]
Some things that were true about publishing for decades aren’t true anymore
Back when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was active with significant publishers — the quarter century following World War II — he observed that very few books actually took in less cash than they required. That is not to say that publishers saw most books as “profitable”. Indeed, they didn’t. They placed an overhead charge of […]
Data helps us understand ebook pricing impacts
My new buddy and client over at iobyte, Dan Lubart, inspired a post last week about Amazon’s new Sunshine promotion because he documented its impact on their bestseller list. Since then he’s put up two new posts that are only worth reading if you care at all about the effect of price on today’s ebook […]
Technology, curation, and why the era of big bookstores is coming to an end
I stumbled across a Sarah Weinman post from a few months ago that posits the notion that the chain bookstore (by which it would appear she means the superstores of the past 20 years, not the chain bookstores in malls that grew up in the prior 20 years) perhaps had a natural life cycle which […]