Note: This post is just exploring what impact things like sales of used books, sharing and libraries have on book sales. It’s not about right and wrong or morals or ethics.
What Impact Do Used Books Have on Sales?
From an earlier post on Whether Used Books are Good or Bad? we have an estimate that Used Book Sales generate $1.466 billion a year and are 10% of total book sales (US only).
If there’s a better estimate let me know and it’ll be updated. However, that does seem somewhat reasonable and conservative.
There are a lot of questions we could ask -
- How many of the used book buying people would buy new books instead?
- How many of the used book selling people would still buy new books?
- How much good do used books do for authors? How many people become new book buying customers?
- Are used books loss leaders to get people into reading and/or keep them involved? Is there a better loss leader/alternate strategy?
With eReaders we suddenly have no used books market. We therefore should be able to tell whether removing the used books market is good or bad.
It might be a few years – However, if eBook sales are better with eReaders, then perhaps removing the used books market had a hand to play.
What Impact does Sharing have on Sales?
Finding data on Sharing is even more elusive than data on used book sales.
No one knows how much books get shared.
How do you measure friend to friend lending?
Again we get questions with no easy, straightforward answer -
- Are shared books lost sales?
- How would people find new books without sharing?
- Do people assign a value to the ability to share? How much?
- How many people share instead of buying? Would they buy if there was no sharing?
The impact of eliminating sharing becomes a little harder to track because the Kindle allows sharing of 6 Kindles on one account – that means family members and close friends can share.
Removing other forms of sharing does limit the amount of sharing and it should be interesting to see how the ‘Sharing helps increase sales’ argument holds up.
What impact do libraries have on Sales?
So far, Libraries and their 14 day timed ebook rentals come the closest to the physical book model.
Just can’t see Publishers close down library lending of ebooks and survive the backlash.
This factor becomes a non-factor.
Lack of Clarity – It’s mostly people speculating
There’s a lot of lack of clarity on both sides of the argument.
- How much ‘creating new fans’ are shared books and used books responsible for?
- Is letting readers read books for free the best way to create new fans?
- Why are Kindle owners buying more books? Are they? Is it just more books from Amazon or more books overall?
- Does anyone have any numbers?
- How do we separate self-interest coupled with intelligent arguments from things that are actually good for reading and readers?
Why don’t we have some hard figures and research i.e.
50,000 people bought Book X.
Those books got shared with 37,000 other people. Of those people 15,000 ended up buying the same or another book by the author. 9,000 bought 2 or more books.
Out of those 50,000 books 11,000 got sold to used book stores. 5,000 of the new people became fans and bought a book by the same author – 3,000 bought new books.
The level above that would be to track those same people and see behavior (not what people say) when sharing and lending was removed.
Could Publishers be passing on profits?
It’s a safe bet to assume Publishers know some of the answers and have better data than we have.
After all, sales of books are the best indicator. It’s not the Publishers job to help tons of people get free books – it’s to help readers who pay for books.
There are just three possibilities -
- Publishers know that removing sharing and used books would increase their sales and profits.
- Publishers aren’t sure and are playing it by ear.
- Publishers’ secret data is telling them that a lack of sharing and used books would hurt sales.
Publishers are pretty strongly against used book sales and sharing. Which means it has to be 1. unless Publishers are just lost.
People who want sharing and used books have an obvious incentive i.e. free books. The whole ‘let people have your product for free because it creates fans and future customers’ is far too dangerous to believe blindly.
It doesn’t help that the exact same argument (letting readers read for free creates new customers) is used by -
- People who outright pirate.
- People who want no DRM or strip DRM.
- People who want ebooks to be shareable.
- People who want a used books market.
If people who steal ebooks are using the exact same argument as you are – then your position gets poisoned.
This is so confusing.
Which is it?
- Are Publishers lost?
- Is self-interest clouding readers’ view of the importance of sharing and used book sales?
Filed under: books Tagged: | kindle vs used books, used books
I have to question the assertion that “[w]ith eReaders we suddenly have no used books market.” It’s going to be a gradual process, not a sudden one. Two reasons why I think this is the case:
1. There are still huge numbers of books, especially those printed between about 1930 and 2000, that will probably never be available in ebook format. I have a large collection of such books myself. These will likely keep the used book market going for a while longer.
2. It’s going to take a while for ereaders to become ubiquitous. Even your beloved iPhone is by no means ubiquitous. It might seem that way when you’re hanging out in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley or on the Stanford campus, but outside of these urban geek enclaves they are few and far between. Kindles are even less visible. It’s going to take a few years and a few more price drops for these gadgets to make their way into non-geek homes.
didn’t mean it disappears. It’s for kindle owners and the books they buy and tracking that behaviour.
Physical Books aren’t going anywhere. However, for the ebooks market we’ll be able to see the impact i.e. what do people with eReaders do?
“People who want no DRM or strip DRM”
I am one of those people who want no DRM but NOT so I can give the book away, I don’t do that unless the author says it is OK, but I want no DRM so I can use the book I thought I bought in the fashion that I thought I could use it, that is on any device I own. At the moment, I cannot buy any books from the B&N store or the Sony store and read them on my Kindle. So why would I even consider going to either of those stores, they obviously don’t want my business. Where is the question “How many more/less sales would be generated for a DRM free book that can be read on a Kindle or Sony Reader or nook or any other device out there?” Eric Flint claims that his paper sales increase on each free e-book he puts out there. He is the one that did that, not the one who rails against it who has not done it. I will believe Eric before anyone who has not done the DRM free route, just as I will believe a Kindle owner’s comments before I believe the people who knock the Kindle but have never seen or used one. On the other hand I am not a big purchaser of books in any format.