Some schools are now forcing students to use e-textbooks.
E-books captured 11% of all book spending last year, up from 7% in 2011, Kulo reported, while e-books accounted for 22% of units in 2012, up from 14% the prior year. In 2010, e-books accounted for only 2% of spending. Despite the gains made by digital, paperback remained the most popular format last year, accounting for 43% of spending, down one percentage point from 2011, while hardcovers represented 37% of dollar sales, down from 39%.
The growth in the e-book format last year was one of the factors that increased e-commerce’s lead as the largest channel for book sales, Kulo noted. Online retailers, led by Amazon, accounted for 44% of sales in 2012, up from 39% in 2011. The gains made by online retailers came at the expense of bookstore chains, whose market share fell to 19%, from 26% in 2011. As consumers buy more e-books they also tend to buy more print books from the same outlet—a trend that has cemented Amazon’s position as the country’s largest booksellers, Kulo said. According to the Bowker data, Amazon captured 31% of dollars spent on all books last year, up from 26% in 2011. Despite the chains’ loss of market share, they were the only other channel besides online retailers to have a slice of the book market that was bigger than 10%. Together, chains and online retailers accounted for 63% of spending in the year, up from 56% in 2009. Independent bookstores had a 6% share of spending in the year, the same as in 2011.
Kulo also noted that the Kindle remained the most popular reading device among e-book buyers in 2012, although some members of the Kindle family gained share while others lost ground. Kindle e-ink devices fell from a 43% share in 2011 to 40% last year, but the percentage of e-book buyers who reported owning a Kindle Fire, released in fall 2011, rose to 20% in 2012, from a low base the prior year. Despite a bad holiday season, Nook was used by 15% of e-book buyers last year—the same level as in 2011. Ownership of iPads remained relatively low among e-book buyers at 19%, up from 15% in 2011. The Kindle family, by a wide margin, was also the most popular group of devices used by e-book buyers to download e-books in 2012, with 55% of the e-book buyers using either the e-ink or tablet versions. The Nook, which held second place, was used by 14%. Tablets, including iPads, came in third at 13%.
More data relating to buying trends and consumer book-buying behavior will be included in the upcoming edition of the 2013 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Review, to be published by Bowker in June.
Authors are benefiting from Google Panda and Google Penguin updates.
I was asked about SEO for authors and what strategy to use. Sharing my thoughts on Google Panda here:
“Do press releases have SEO value after Google Panda?”
Anything “for SEO purposes” that you did 3 months ago needs to be retested unless you know you are getting results today.
Panda is NOT a one time change. Google has been opening telling us that both Penguin and Panda are designed to find patterns created by SEO and that there will be changes every month or so from now on. It’s not the end of optimizing, but “SEO” as it’s been done for the past 15 years is a profession like carburetor repair.
Real press releases that get media attention and placement in Google News and authority sites is not “SEO” but wonderful for business. Getting an interview in on an industry site or guest blog post on a high authority blog is better, read more, and a permanent high authority site.
Optimizing for what Google wants is great. Tricking Google is akin to matching your resources up against and army of Phd engineers with billions of dollars of computer power.
If you think you’ve found a new trick, remember, Google knows we’re having this conversation and will adjust to give searchers the best content.
When you think about it, you can imagine a much different world. Would we be fighting over oil? Could we invent a machine that pulls pollution out of the enviroment and changes the climate to wherever it should be?
Atomic energy proponents (before it was ‘nuclear’) assured us that energy would be much cheaper.. and who knows, that may still happen.
But today, I hope you’ll think beyond the energy example and apply what we’ve learned from other commodities. Internet access, long distance phone service, hard drive storage and computing power would are all nearly free if you compare prices to just a few year back.
Best selling author Chris Anderson has a new book on FREE coming out soon. He’s the guy that made the phrase “long tail” popular. You can hear him talk about what’s coming next at this site
In our book marketing and promotion programs, we often give away books.. and even when we sell them for retail prices, a book is an incredable bargain, with most of the profits taken out before the author sees a royaties.
Yet every year, more and more successful people decide to write a book
We do it becuase we have found a model that works. We know that the relationship with the reader will be far more profitable than the few dollars we could make on a book.
Some authors do make royalties from their book, but the most successfull authors who sell a lot of books,make the best seller lists and create an information empire tell me that the royalties are just a drop in the bucket compared to the income they receive because of your status as a best selling author.
How does this apply to your business? Are you prepared to turn you biggest selling product into a giveaway? Can you adapt your marketing to take advantage of the nearly free products coming taking over the world?
I recently talked to an author who gave away 11,312 copies of his book in one year. Many times the readership of the average author. These readers usually paid for shipping and handling, so we aren’t talking about just handing the book out on the street. His result was millions of dollars in increase revenue for his company.
I’d say that was worth it.
We don’t advocate that you start giving away your book. We do advcate looking at the business you are in, the lifetime value of a new procpect. Once you understand the numbers, you will find that each new reader (on average) is worth much more than the retil price of the book to you.
THe arithmatic to determine that value is simple.
Life Time Value = revenue divided by # of readers
And when you know that number, you’ll know how to budget for marketing and promotion.
