The
all-you-can-eat approach to ebooks is injuring the book industry in many
ways. Publishers make less money, as do
authors.
Let’s
see the data. Revenue in 2013 for ebooks
leveled off in 2013 at $3 billion, after increasing nearly 50% in 2012.
In 2010,
Kindle had 600,000 offerings. Today it
has three million. Smashwords, which
distributes self-published ebooks, increase the number of titles offered by 20%
this past year. So one pattern is clear
– more writers are getting published and more books are becoming available and
prices are dropping. As ebook prices
drop, it widens the gap vs. print prices.
The result is people will continue to move away from print or print will
have to cut profit margins and drop prices.
Neither scenario is ideal.
Kindle
Unlimited is a service that bundles certain ebooks in a monthly all-you-can-read
service. Oyster and Scribd do the
same. They crave to be the book version
of Netflix (film/TV) and Spotify (music), Kindle Unlimited offers 700,000 books
for $10 a month.
These
services, in order to truly help the book industry, need to hike the monthly
fee. Further, it needs to keep a
two-tier approach – new or popular books should not be included. Further, ebooks should come out after print
books debut, much like we have a movie go from theater to sale to On-Demand.
Dirt-cheap
books screw everyone up. For instance,
how can newspapers and magazines survive when they compete with free digital
content like blogs and websites, and ebooks that cost less than their
publications?
I don’t
see why a publisher or author would want to have its books sold this way. Sure a publisher may think its backlist,
underperforming titles, or unknown authors could find a market in the
buffet-style service, but how much money can you make under such a plan? The more people get used to paying almost
nothing for books the less likely they’ll pay for single-book content, even if
it’s the next Harry Potter.
I guess
the key to all of this is the books that will sell will be the ones that don’t
get lost in the all-you-can-eat approach.
Instead, they need to be marketed and promoted heavily and
intelligently. But they’ll need to offer
the perception of value in order to get people to pay double digits in a world
of free or pennies for one’s life creation.
DON’T MISS: ALL NEW RESOURCE OF THE YEAR
2015 Book PR & Marketing Toolkit: All New
Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas
expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person.
This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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