ebook market share
Apr. 15th, 2011 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutYesterday's press release from AAP for Feb 2011 numbers can be found at:
http://www.publishers.org/press/30/
"For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.*"
What is the relationship between 164 and 442? I'm getting that the first number is about 27% of the total of the two numbers. It is not completely clear to me whether the "combined categories" is print trade, or if it also includes religious, education and professional/scholarly categories. If the latter, whoa and like damn.
Why didn't I see coverage of this? My search terms on google must have been inadequate. I will attempt again.
ETA:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/15/technology/ebooks_beat_paperbacks/
The headline on that seems hopelessly inadequate. Also, by putting in a caveat that the data is from publishers, some of whom do not participate, it also fails to point out that some of those paper book sales will come undone when retailers return unsold books -- but none of the electronic sales will.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/46870-e-book-sales-explode-in-february-as-other-segments-sink.html
That's a better headline.
There's a bunch of other coverage, mostly in bookseller/bookpublisher oriented sites and a few financial sites. They are generally just repeating the numbers and/or math and/or explanation from the press release. No one is doing the math I did above, so I can't tell if that's a wrong way to calculate share.
ETA: R. says that in the vinyl -> CD transition, there was a lot of media coverage from about 1980-1985, and then a big gap in coverage. It picked up again in the 1990s, when the "death of vinyl" really took off as a meme. His sense was that the adoption curve through the first 20% was covered, and after it hit 90%, and not much in between. He thinks the DVD adoption curve was too compressed to go through anything particularly comparable.
http://www.publishers.org/press/30/
"For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.*"
What is the relationship between 164 and 442? I'm getting that the first number is about 27% of the total of the two numbers. It is not completely clear to me whether the "combined categories" is print trade, or if it also includes religious, education and professional/scholarly categories. If the latter, whoa and like damn.
Why didn't I see coverage of this? My search terms on google must have been inadequate. I will attempt again.
ETA:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/15/technology/ebooks_beat_paperbacks/
The headline on that seems hopelessly inadequate. Also, by putting in a caveat that the data is from publishers, some of whom do not participate, it also fails to point out that some of those paper book sales will come undone when retailers return unsold books -- but none of the electronic sales will.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/46870-e-book-sales-explode-in-february-as-other-segments-sink.html
That's a better headline.
There's a bunch of other coverage, mostly in bookseller/bookpublisher oriented sites and a few financial sites. They are generally just repeating the numbers and/or math and/or explanation from the press release. No one is doing the math I did above, so I can't tell if that's a wrong way to calculate share.
ETA: R. says that in the vinyl -> CD transition, there was a lot of media coverage from about 1980-1985, and then a big gap in coverage. It picked up again in the 1990s, when the "death of vinyl" really took off as a meme. His sense was that the adoption curve through the first 20% was covered, and after it hit 90%, and not much in between. He thinks the DVD adoption curve was too compressed to go through anything particularly comparable.
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February E-Book Sales
Date: 2011-04-29 04:12 am (UTC)I did try to do some of the breakdowns you discuss, and from what I could gather from the figures I could find, e-books comprised 29.56% of all trade book sales, which includes children's / YA but does not include religious, scholarly, or educational categories.
http://www.davidderrico.com/february-e-book-sales-overtake-trade-paperbacks/