AuthorEarnings.com commented in their October 2016 report: "This October surprise flat-out blindsided us… What had happened was that after two and a half years of quarter-over-quarter growth, Indie eBook market share shrinks significantly."
The reasons for this change to the 2-year climb can only be speculative. Maybe Amazon promotes more legacy publishers to offset their gradually reduction in print book discounts?
Another reason could be that Amazon Prime and KU customers are buying less e-books, as they can read them for free. And the amount of Prime members is constantly climbing...
The reasons for this change to the 2-year climb can only be speculative. Maybe Amazon promotes more legacy publishers to offset their gradually reduction in print book discounts?
Another reason could be that Amazon Prime and KU customers are buying less e-books, as they can read them for free. And the amount of Prime members is constantly climbing...
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Here are the findings of AuthorEarnings.com in a nutshell:
- Indie ebook market share drops all the way back to early 2015 levels.
- Traditional publishers regain a little lost ebook ground.
- Amazon publishing imprints grow a lot.
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Another important clarification of Nielsen's BookScan Reports:
- print book sales at mass merchandisers like Walmart, Target, Costco, and Sam’s Club, which collectively make up a far larger share of US book sales than the ABA’s independent bookstores do, shrank almost 9% in 2015. And in 2016, those mass merchandiser sales have thus far fallen a further 4%.
"With print sales at independent ABA bookstores up a tiny bit, but book sales at all major US bookstore chains and mass merchandisers down by almost an order of magnitude more, then why does Nielsen Bookscan’s “Retail & Club” sector still report that US print book sales are up 5% overall?"
AuthorEarnings: "The answer’s pretty simple.
- Nielsen Bookscan’s “Retail & Club” sector doesn’t primarily track US physical bookstore sales anymore–it also includes online print sales, including Amazon’s.
- Nowadays, more than 50% of the total sales reported in Bookscan’s “Retail & Club” category are Amazon.com online print sales; US physical bookstore sales now make up the minority.
- In the past 12 months, fueled by deeper Amazon print discounts,Amazon’s online print sales have exploded–growing by a double digit percentage year-on-year.
- Those fast-growing Amazon online print sales have more than offset the collapsing sales at physical bookstores, leaving us with a 5%overall net print-sales gain for the US.
- When Bookscan lumps both together into one reporting category, it completely obscures this rapid shift in where those books are being bought, letting us see only the net 5% overall print-sales gain (including Amazon).""The media mistakenly reports that net 5% gain
as a nationwide increase in sales at “bookstores.”
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