The main stream press constantly reminds us that there are 30 million or so netbooks in circulation, 50 million or so iPhones, and hundreds of millions of PCs and phones. Since all these devices are capable of being used for reading it follows that they are extremely important for reading - After all the potential is unlimited.
How long are we going to focus on potential as opposed to reality?
We’ve had computers and phones forever – eBooks never took off and yet we kept talking about the possibilities and the importance of the PC and the phone for ebooks. Why focus so much on what may potentially happen at the cost of what is really happening.
Let’s say you have a store and you have three sets of people -
- The 10 million people a year who walk by and never enter.
- The 1 million people a year who walk in, take a look around and buy a product once a year.
- The 200,000 people a year who walk in every month and buy one or more products every time.
Book Publishers are obsessed with 1.
With eBooks today we’re taking the approach of salivating over the 10 million people who never enter our store. What’s the point?
Who cares if there are 50 million iPhone owners. Even Flurry (an iPhone Analytics company) lists the number of people reading books on the iPhone at around 3 million.
There are 50 million people walking by. 3 million of them step into the store and they buy ebooks once in a while. Yet the iPhone is guest of honor at the eBook Ball and everyone keeps using the 50 million figure.
Number of devices that could be used to read books doesn’t matter – Number of devices used and number of ebooks read does
This is a really simple truth that everyone seems to be running away from.
No one cares if there are 150 million units of Device X in circulation that could be used to read books on. All that matters is how much reading is happening on a particular device.
The iPhone has zero book apps in its list of 100 top paid apps. In the top 100 paid book apps there are no books other than the Twilight Series and the Bible. Yet the iPhone is important for ebooks - because it has 50 million people who could read on it. Except they don’t.
Tablets are another great example – People are buying them to surf the Internet and watch movies and play games and yet book publishers are flocking to them hoping for miracles.
It’s not clear to me why instead of using simple facts like how many books are sold, at what prices, and how many books are sold per user we are flocking around irrelevant figures like number of people who could potentially read books on a device.
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | results vs promise, trapped by potential
Makes more sense to me to count the number of books or ebooks sold rather than the number of devices to read them on — I sometimes am reading the same book on my Kindle, iPhone, and computer — depending on what one(s) I have with me. (I have just learned to keep track of what chapter I am on all of the time, so I can easily locate my place to continue reading when I switch devices). On the otherhand, even though I am from a techie family and we have many electronic devices that could be used for reading, I am the only one with a dedicated reader and the only one reading ebooks on any device.