Random House has flipped the kill switch on the Kindle 2 Read To Me feature for 40 or so of their titles. Given the convenience to customers, especially blind customers and commuters, this is obviously not a decision made for the customer’s benefit.
The decision then must make a lot of sense financially – surely, the only possible explanation to reduce utility for customers is to increase profits. Well, let’s take a look at the numbers -
How are audiobook sales doing?
The 2007 to 2008 sales comparisons table from AAP is enlightening, and two rows in particular really stand out i.e.
E-books 67,233 113,220 68.4 That’s a 68.4% increase in ebook sales.
Audiobooks 218,230 172,402 -21.0 Yup! A 21% decline. And this is before Kindle 2 and TTS were released (lest Publishers blame it on the Kindle
)
The decline in audiobook sales started in 2004/2005 (down 2%), accelerated in 2005/2006 (down 12%), and although the APA (audio book publishers association) stopped releasing figures (can’t blame them given the decline), the AAP figures above indicate the pace of decline is accelerating.
AudioBooks are a declining industry – a 21% year over year decline is pretty telling.
How are ebooks doing?
eBooks grew 68.4% from 2007 to 2008 according to the AAP figures indicated above.
That was before Kindle 2 was released and hundreds of thousands of Kindle 2s were sold. This month we also hit the point where at Amazon.com 35% of sales for books that have kindle editions available were of Kindle editions.
Look at the data points -
- eBooks are the only segment of the industry apart from ‘other’ that are growing.
- They’re also the single fastest growing segment of books.
- Kindle 2 has almost certainly accelerated their growth.
- The emergence of the kindle, iphone ebook apps, Sony’s reader, and the numerous other alleged and actual ereaders is accelerating ebooks further.
The logical conclusion would be that books are transitioning from physical to electronic.
How is Random House reacting to this?
Random House are turning off features and capabilities that ebooks enable and are reducing the benefit to customers.
To protect a declining revenue stream (i.e. audiobooks) that may or may not be affected by the Read To Me feature, Random House are sabotaging their ebook offering, the only form of books that are seeing year over year growth.
At a time when huge companies with already existing lucrative revenue streams are looking at ebooks (Amazon, Google, Sony, potentially Apple) because they have so much potential, the incumbents i.e. publishers like Random House, are trying everything they can to sabotage ebooks.
Look at Publishers’ stance -
- No mention of benefits like the end of the used books market.
- Play down benefits such as cheaper distribution and storage.
- Impede companies like Amazon that try to promote ebooks.
- Sabotage features like TTS that make ebooks more attractive than physical books.
By turning off TTS for their books, Random House is hurting themself much more than whatever benefit they’ll get from saving audiobook sales.
What happens when you turn off TTS and anger customers?
A few things -
- A PR hit. You’re pretty much saying that some small amount of profit is worth more than your customers’ happiness.
- Lots of blind groups, and aligned groups, will simply boycott your books.
- eBooks from other publishers that continue to include Read To Me gain a competitive advantage.
Most important of all, you lose your customers’ trust.
The Kindle 2 and Kindle DX, along with other ereaders, are gradually expanding their customer base. eBooks are becoming increasingly important. In this environment, fighting the change is a waste of resources. Fighting it on fronts that angers customers and hurts your relationship with them is worse.
Filed under: thoughts | Tagged: kindle 2 read to me, kindle tts
Random House turns off TTS
I turn off Random House
[...] by turning off text to speech in the case of at least some Kindle books? Questions like those emerge directly or indirectly in an iReader post, and I think it’s on [...]
[...] by turning off text to speech in the cases of at least some Kindle books? Questions like those emerge directly or indirectly in an iReader post based on AAP stats, and I think it’s on [...]
I’ve taken to emailing the publisher every time I would have purchased an e-book from them but did not because text to speech was disabled. Saying “I would like to politely inform you that you have lost $X.XX by disabling TTS on “Insert book title and author here.” If enough people join me in this endeavor maybe they will get the point.
For example I just read 3 Frank Herbert books in 2 weeks using text-to-speech at work and in my car, all of which where purchased legally through Amazon. I need a break from the Dune series and I was planning on reading some Phillip K. Dick, however I found that TTS had been disabled on all of his books and now I will simply find something else to read.