With every new release of a new product, new feature, new price point, and even with the release of some new books, questions over the future of publishing surge like feeding time at the piranha tank.
The newest Kindle is released… the iPad is announced… the iPad is released… the Kindle is reduced in price… Stieg Larsson sells a million copies on the Kindle… Kindle sales exceed hardcover sales… best-selling author/blogger Seth Godin is moving on and swears off publishing forever… Each news item launches a thousand ships of furious speculation. It’s not even a question of whether or not the traditional paper-based publishing industry is dying, the question everyone is asking is, when will it die? Or has it died already? Is that breathing we hear, or a death rattle?
So the question many writers are asking me is, should I even worry about getting published? Should I concentrate my efforts on eBooks instead?
Far from Dead
The truth is that in 2010, the print publishing industry is far from being dead.
While Amazon eBook sales now do exceed hardcover sales by a ratio of 1.43 to 1, we should remember that many of those “sales” are 25-cent downloads, many of them are free, and many of them are what, if we saw them in print, could be easily be mistaken for brochures rather than honest-to-goodness books. (Have you noticed every internet marketer seems to have a free Kindle or iPad edition of their latest “free report” these days?)
In fact, according to the NY Times, half of the best selling books on Kindle are being given away for free by the publishers. Why? In order to promote sales of the paper versions.
More Facts You Should Know
In Larssen’s case, we should also remember that his novel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, published in 2007, sold 27 million copies in print, before it reached the million dollar milestone on Amazon’s Kindle. By all accounts, print sales vastly exceed eBook sales.
Here are some more facts to ponder:
The iPad is expected to sell, at most, 7 million units in 2010.
By April 2010, the Kindle had sold (at best estimate) 3.3 million units.
The average royalty cheque for authors is estimated to be less than 2% for their eBooks, which means 98 percent of their royalties still come from paper books.
In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that approximately 200,000 books are published each year in traditional book publishing. Less than 1 percent make it to bestseller status.
The American Publishing Association estimates e-books represent 8.5% of sales as of mid-2010. In 2009 they were only 3%.
While eBooks are certainly gaining in overall market share, and are going to become bigger as time passes, the print publishing industry is still today the dominant player. Any hype saying the contrary right now is just that – hype.
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