It should surprise no one that I love digital technology. Of the last hundred books that I have read, only five have been print editions. All others were ebooks or audiobooks. Of those ebooks and audiobooks, 90% are from Amazon. And this is in spite of my efforts to diversify my library.
As a consumer, it is hard to dislike a company that considers customer satisfaction its highest priority. It is hard to resist shopping from home on a website that offers so much variety and such good prices. I find it even harder to choose broadcast or cable television over the offerings of Amazon Prime. Nor is it easy to resist the huge discounts that Audible (an Amazon company) offers for Whispersync audiobooks. Audible will soon do to the audiobook market what Amazon has done to the print and digital book markets, if it hasn't already.
It is what Amazon has done to those markets that is the most disturbing aspect of its existence. (Even more disturbing than its labor practices.) The big box bookseller chains that drove so many of the smaller local bookstores out of business during the 1980s don't generate much sympathy from me today over the challenges that Amazon represents to their survival. Nor do I worry overmuch about the teeny, tiny group of publishers that remain, now that they have swallowed all of their smaller competitors.
No, my concern is for what our intellectual future will look like when one corporate entity controls all of the publishing and distribution of ideas.
I know I should be more worried about the NSA and all of the information it collects. But Jeff Bezos knows a whole lot more about me than NSA does, and he is capable of actually understanding and using the data he has collected over the years.
But as bibliophile, I consider that to be a lesser threat than the concentration of books and all they represent, into the hands of one man. Or one corporation. It may sound far-fetched, but according to DigitalBookWorld.com as of last summer, Amazon "has 70%-to-80% market share for ebooks sales and about a 50% market share for books sold online (that’s ebooks and printed books sold via the Internet)."
Perhaps it is easier to believe that Amazon will one day control the publishing and sales of genre fiction.
Why genre fiction? Because it is the most popular form of ebook reading material, making up 69% of Amazon's top 50,000 bestsellers. Non-fiction makes up 22%, Fiction and Literature 5%, Childrens Books, Graphic Novels and Foreign Language make up the remaining 4% of total ebook bestsellers.
Keep in mind that ebook sales between 2008 and 2012,
rose from $68 million to $3 billion, what’s technically known as a gazillion percent increase. Absent ebooks, total print book sales did shrink about 8%.
Aaron Pressman
Yahoo Finance
Those figures are from the American Publishers Association. Remember that source; it only tells part of the story.
Because everything we thought we knew about the ebook market penetration is wrong.
The generally accepted market share of ebooks has been between 25 and 30% of book sales. And while those figures always seemed low to me, I figured it was because I was an outlier with 95% of my book purchases being either digital or audio. It never occurred to me that it might have something to do with the fact that those figures only represented the sales of the big publishers.
Let me repeat that: those figures only represented the sales of the major publishers.
Completely missing from the figures were the data from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play. They don’t reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25% to 30%.
There’s a second and equally important reason to doubt a 25% e-book penetration number: The other 75% of those titles includes textbooks, academic books, cookbooks, children’s books, and all the many categories that are relatively safe from digitization (for now). Print remains healthy in these categories, but these aren’t the books most people think of when they hear that percentage quoted. E-book market share is generally spoken of in the context of the New York Times bestsellers, the novels and non-fiction works that are referred to as “trade” publications. If we look specifically at this trade market, it’s quite likely that e-books already account for more than 50% of current sales (some publishers have intimated as much [link]). Factoring in self-publishing and further limiting the scope to fiction, I’ve seen guesses as high as 70%. But that can’t be possible, right?
Author Earnings
The Report
Possible? Look at the breakdown of Amazon sales between formats for the top 100 bestsellers in the fiction genre:
The trend is still present in the top 2500 bestsellers:
Pretty amazing isn't it?
Amazon's ebook sales data are notoriously hard to come by due to its determination to keep them private. But Hugh Howey, bestselling author of the self published Wool series, has joined forces with a software data guru, who is also an author, to collect and analyze what information is available publicly on Amazon's website. Using specially designed software, Howey's partner was able to grab data from the bestseller lists. And what they found was remarkable and not just in regards to market penetration.
Granted, all of the information posted in the resulting Author Earnings Report was based only on Amazon sales. But since Amazon accounts for the biggest chunk of the ebook market (70-80% according to DBW, see above link) the information cannot be ignored.
The Report uses data from three genres, Mystery/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy and Romance. These three are the most popular genres, and as shown in the chart above, they make up 69% of the 50,000 bestsellers.
These are also the genres in which there is ebook growth potential. The Big Five only provides 28% of the titles in the genre ebook bestsellers. Kindle, Indie and small/medium publishers account for 54%. But that is only half of the story. Kindle, Indie and small/medium publisher make up 62% of the daily unit sales. Clearly this is an area of fiction that the big publishers are underserving.
Howey's report also takes a close look at the income potential for authors from self publishing and compares it the income from going the traditional publishing route. To any writer, or aspiring writer, this Report is a must read. Updates are regularly published on the website.
It is in the realm of genre fiction that I fear Amazon's ability to gain control of the market. They are the books most likely to be purchased and read digitally. If they make the self publishing experience as easy and pleasant for the author as the purchase experience is for the buyer there is no telling where the ceiling will be.
We often don't credit genre fiction for more than plots. But they also convey ideas, some of them radical. Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Stephen King all have political points of view that come across in their fiction. Agree or not, it is important that they continue to have the right to be heard. But if there is only one publisher who happens to be the only distributer of genre fiction, the possibility of censorship is very real. It may be censorship of the dollar, but it is still censorship all the same. That disturbs me.
Thank you athenap for alerting me to this valuable report last week in the comments of the last ebook diary.