No one buys books
Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech.
You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.
You print books? Well we have e-books now.
You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it.
You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
What's sad though is that publishers have historically had one power that would have been unassailable – editorial judgement. They could have sustained their brands on quality. Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good". Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors, and here we are.
I recently started buying paper books.
Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me.
It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc. I will do anything instead of reading the text. Meanwhile with a paper book I don't have an urge to flip a page back and forth and observe how it behaves. I can focus on the text.
Not sure why I am this way.
I used to buy and read a lot of physical books. Around 2013-204, I started moving to eBooks, and Amazon Kindle played a significant role in my journey. But a couple of years later, I had an epiphany while discussing books with my daughter, “I never see you read books. You are just reading on your computer (kindle) or the phone and are not reading.”
Since then, I have returned to reading physical books with an approximate ratio of 1:5 against digital ones. I have kinda rule/understanding with my daughters -- you have unlimited access to books that you can read, and you also get extra pocket money for reading them. Of course, it is OK not to finish a book, but in that case, a few cool-down days before buying another one.
Yes, buy and read physical books. I believe, the return is a magnitude higher for everyone than the loss it does to anything. If you have kids, read more physical books in front of them. Encourage them to read physical books. They are less distracting and help the kids focus.
Five years ago, I wrote a story about it. https://story.oinam.com/2018/why-physical-books-matter/
319 comments and I don't see the simple fact that the article title is dead wrong.
We are going through a massive book boom right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLSGuGOWoAArd-K.jpg:large.
Book sales are the highest they've been in 20 years lol. So all the comments mourning books can relax.
The entire book industry rides on the backs of bibles, hobbits, and extremely ravenous caterpillars.
Seems almost poetic, somehow.
I'm currently writing a book about independent thinking and I have zero expectations that it will sell even a single copy. However, the net gain I will get from having completed the goal of writing the book is invaluable to me personally.
Anecdotally I'm buying and reading more books now than at any other point in my life.
Reading gets me away from a computer screen, which I would otherwise stare at from sunrise to sundown.
I tend to be a late adopter. Once things are close to obsolete I usually get involved!
Although books have the disadvantage of being a similar focal distance as a screen and for this reason is still bad for my eyesight!
Main value prop of physical books for me: guaranteed zero interruptions from the book itself. Worst case, the pages stick together, or pages are missing, or damaged, or other very infrequent causes of distraction.
All modern digital systems are by comparison, distraction machines. You never know when the next interruption ('notification') gets surfaced, the next update, the next forced restart, the next bug, the next battery problem, the next broken or lost charger cable.
Physical books require light, the book, and your mind. All else fades away, and your mind is given free reign to ponder, to consider, to deliberate. No wonder civilization flourished whenever the physical written form was embraced at sustained scale.
No one bought books. If one can believe Edward Dahberg, the first run of Thus Spake Zarathusra sold ten copies, the first run of Stendhal's On Love, seventeen copies. That considered, Thoreau selling just more than 200 of the first printing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appears as a raging success--but he had many literate friends.
Simon Leys, in the essay "Readers' Rewards and Writers' Rewards", quotes the French writer, and sometime publisher, Jacques Chardonne as saying that "Any good book will find 3,000 readers, no more no less." Leys goes on to say the number hasn't varied significantly in last 400 years. (Collected in The Hall of Uselessness)
Almost everything this post describes is not new, not even 21st century new. E-books market share seems to be stuck at about 20% of the total market, where it's been since the early teens. The decline of the print book is more or less like the decline of vinyl albums, except that it never actually declined that much.
However, a lot more people want to be a best-selling author, than there are spots available, so most books don't sell much, and there are lots more authors who cannot get any advance at all. It was ever thus.
Most books today are sold with DRM and when the DRM servers are deactivated the books stop working.
This happened with the Microsoft ebooks store and has happened with countless other DRM media.
Sometimes books are automatically revised, or censored. Sometimes accounts holding DRM licenses are deleted or deactivated by mistake.
The only way to actually own a book these days is to buy it on paper, or from one of the rare few publishers that do not use DRM.
If you want a DRM free e-book collection you will need a book scanner or send it to a scanning service.
Yep. No money in it short of not just getting optioned for TV or film, but an actual released production. Even then, a hit or two likely won’t pay as much as you’d think. Some pretty damn successful authors have boring day jobs, or stopped after a handful of “successful” books that didn’t make them much money and went back to a normal corporate career.
The other option is to crank out (ha, ha) short romance novels like a machine and market like mad. The money’s in hard work at writing porn, or in big broad-audience grand slams, probably written at a junior high reading level, with a small niche supporting a handful of authors in writing based-on-a-true-story stuff (bonus if “true crime” connection) aimed directly at getting optioned for film or tv (but that one’s very hard to break into, studios have some go-to authors for that stuff and you ain’t one of them)
I've asked a number of agents online for two numbers:
1) How many unsolicited queries have you received, in whatever time period you like: month, quarter, year, forever?
2) How many turned into published books?
None will provide that data, but I strongly suspect that the answer to #2 is "zero."
They'll happily quote you BS quantities, like "a bunch" or "a handful."
So as this article says, they spend their time chasing celebrities, online influencers, and friends of friends. And not making a whole lot of money anyway.
Just going to drop this here: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...
This comes up constantly and it’s just wrong.
I read this and think about Sanglard's book:
https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
He has 0.77 dollar profit on an 51 dollar book. A minimal campaign with some organisational backing on HN alone should be able to get 1000 books sold, no? Every programmer who lived trough the doom craze is interested. It would place him above the average number of books sold.
>> Q. And Penguin Random House pays Amazon to improve its search results?
>> A. There is something that is available to our publishers, it’s called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS, and all publishers can spend money and give it to Amazon to have hopefully better search results.
>> — Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House
Wait, "hopefully better"?
What the hell is Amazon selling, magic publishing advertising snake oil?
If I'm paying for placement, I'd expect something more than hope.
I wish my daughters would stop reading books (not really) so I could stop buying them all the time (happy to pay this expense). I was worried for a while because my wife and I are both voracious readers, but none of our children seemed to be developing a similar love for literature. That changed practically overnight. They went from Anime to Manga to YA lit to full blown novels in less than a year. Their tastes are still very particular, so we can't reliably go to a used book store to find things they are willing to try. But each time we go to buy them books, their selections get a little more varied than before.
The latest game is "How many books can I get?". I think they know perfectly well that I'll buy them as many books as they want because I've never told them I wouldn't buy them a book. So in a way it's them exploring their own impulsiveness and desire to consume versus what they consider to be reasonable. I always make them set their own limit. But I'm also fortunate to be a tech worker who doesn't have to even think about budgeting for books. Telling them no has never been a practical consideration here.
Turn it around:
How much new information is there published in book form each year which the average person needs to (or wants to) read?
How much leisure time does the average person choose to dedicate each year to reading? How do they decide which book(s) will be selected for this?
Arguably the problem is that much of the purpose which books traditionally take up has been replaced by:
- encyclopedias --- Wikipedia
- magazines/newspapers --- Facebook and social media
- dime store novels --- fan fiction and webcomics
Time was that the way to be successful w/ a self-published book was to manage to get it bought by the ~9,000 library systems in the U.S. --- how many of these books are being purchased by libraries?
From the article: "The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles"
Well that was a depressing read (no pun intended).
Books are functionally a type of merch (low end) or art object (high end) at this point. The companies that sell the most understand this, whereas those that adhere to the old model of focusing on the words/information inside are struggling.
For example: celebrity books like David Goggins’ sell extremely well at a lower price point. At the other end, Taschen, who makes expensive art books and partners with celebrities often, also does well.
OK, I haven't read the whole thing yet but this bit raised an eyebrow...
>These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: _publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)._
Why do we view this as a vanity project and not the purpose of the whole endeavour? The celebrity books are just to raw material that allow them to dot heir real job; to make books those fragments of human connection widely available to the people who might need them, a service to readers and to future generations that isn't just about making money.
Incidentally, today is the day of the books and roses [1] in Catalonia.
If you are ever planning on visiting Barcelona I promise you won't regret it if you can arrange it so you are there on Apr 23rd.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_Books_and_Roses
Theres something rather magical about reading books. Or perhaps Im just an old fart that grew up without the internet.
The article is fascinating but worrying. I do hope the industry survives in some form. I love the experience of reading books. It would be a shame if everything was digital although it seems like an inescapable conclusion after looking at the data in the article…
The headline isn't accurate. "No One Buys Most Books" maybe, but the article talks about books that sell more than 300,000 copies in a year. 90% of books sell fewer than 2000 copies in a year, but 2000 is actually a decent number, especially considering it will be a lot more than 2000 over the lifetime of the book.
There's more to this as well. You have to factor in that a lot of people write books because they want to say they wrote a book, and others do it because it supports their professional brand, so there was never an intention or expectation of selling a thousand copies.
Haven't libraries already been a "Netflix of books" for millenia now?
It’s me. I’m No One.
Because I buy them every week. So does my wife. I guess we are No One.
Does this include technical books? O'Reilly and Manning seem to have substantial customers. Or is the licensing of PDFs excluded from such figures?
Counterpoint: after taking a big hit during the pandemic years of 2020-2022, global book sales are climbing again. Sales are down compared to the years before 2019, but the trend recently has been positive, especially for audio and e-books.
> I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
I know this is in some way an irritating thing to say, but this is exactly what I would have guessed before I read the article. It's cool to see numbers put to it but I don't think this was a secret.
I am struck by the coda where the antitrust intervention did nothing to preserve a healthy market. Kind of a common story.
Paper Books for random-access Technical Reference.
Electronic Books for General 'Beginning-to-End', or 'Story-Telling' reading.
In general, though most books can be either paper or electronic depending on personal convenience at the time. It's not a 'Black and White', 'One Thing or the Other' choice. Both formats are as good as the other if need be.
I use both. "Works for Me."
Well, if there's any comfort: The AI will definitely read your book...
For "linear fiction"[0] I use an e-ink reader exclusively. I also re-read books pretty much never. There are way too many excellent books I haven't read yet, so why would I spend time redoing something I have already experienced? I can easily hi-light stuff on the Kindle and check them out from Goodreads if I need to later.
For books I read for work and other knowledge stuff it's either PDF on an iPad or a web page. In some rare cases a physical book, but stuff tends to move so fast paper reference books expire too fast to have any advantage compared to asking a large language model.
If I get the urge to make any notes from this category, they go into Obsidian.
[0] Books that are read from beginning to end with no need to jump around to check stuff you read before. Could be a biography too, which isn't fiction per se.
I've published a few self-published books on Amazon about my global adventures. While sales are not making me rich, they certainly do sell month after month.
The same could be said about the game industry and the music industry. 1% of the industry thrives while the rest is a sinking stone.
That said I bought three books this week, but it's a rare occurrence... and I'm pretty sure they're re-printed by Amazon.
No one buys books, cd's, dvd's, blurays, magazines, comics, games, and many other things that were bought a lot 10-30 years ago. These days everything is online and (usually) subscription based.
Looking at myself, the only things I buy regularly, is food ;)
I have about 6000 books, about 1000 of these are on Kindle.
Of the 6000, most have bookmarks. I read at least the first 50 pages of most of them. I've finished a couple hundred so far. I found my old business cards make perfect bookmarks.
I guess "No one buys books" isn't strictly true.
I tried to write 4 books. I was told that I'd likely sell less that 1000. Beyond that would be considered a major win. I finished one, published it, and have made about $500. It took me months to write.
I love books. I have a copy of "I, Robot" signed by Asimov. I really like books signed by authors.
> Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that…..
I guarantee any book-length post on substack will get substantially LESS views than that.
This person discovered what any aspiring writer who cares already knows: Publishing like music runs on proven revenue generating content and gambles on the next big hit. Same as it ever was, and Amazon changes nothing about that fact.
Maybe publishing consolidates and changes, companies boom or bust but the business itself has always been like this.
Books are like the wayback machine. You can reread authors as they actually wrote their oeuvres without editing from modern day overzealous publishers who censor or otherwise alter the originals.
I've been buying scifi books from thrift stores for a decade or more.
But in the last couple years, there's been a near complete collapse in it. The racks of scifi have abruptly dwindled to a handful of lonely books. The entire book section has dramatically shrunk as well. This is across thrift stores, not just one.
Is it:
1. nobody buys physical books anymore
2. nobody donates physical books anymore
3. donations seem to be driven by estate sales. Maybe the book lovers have already all died out and their estates are liquidated
I don't know. But I'm glad I bought the books when I could.
So, I usually think in terms of longevity. I do own some books, because in case computers don’t work anymore, well I can still read good stuff. I have plenty of PDFs/epubs in my laptop because the internet may not work anymore anytime. I do have some stuff in the cloud, but just for convenience (I don’t care if those files disappear).
Same with music, movies and video games. I want to be able to “run” stuff offline. Electricity is still a big dependency (i’m looking into solar panels)
Our brains our overloaded with text these days with all the scrolling of news, email, texts and at work which mostly involves even more text.
Reading a great book has great value, I think most people would agree, but to even get to the cognitive state where we could even consider doing this, we have to reduce our enormous load of text that is not work-related. I started doing this a few years back and I got back into reading in my spare time and I will never regret it.
I love reading books, and I write: I've had essays published in various internet corners, and I'm working on a humble little book of my own. Few who write do so for the money, and like most things, the Pareto Principle applies. That being said, another commenter has pointed out that book sales data suggests we are actually in a book boom.
Also, publishers are absolutely in it for the money. But the quotes and analysis of this article suggest that publishing houses are too big and a victim of their own size. It seems like they can't "run lean" and are big enough that they are trying to find books that can sell millions of copies.
Other questions I had while reading the article: - Is there any Hollywood accounting in the book industry?
- Do writer's advances still make sense? What if advances were smaller but royalties are bigger?
- These companies are looking for books that can sell millions of copies, but they could also a) raise the price, or b) have supplemental products + content for avid readers and fans.
In my essay “Writing books isn’t a good idea” I wrote that, in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.
yaawn..this useless stat again? The author erroneously mixes fiction with non-fiction. Of course, non-fiction from a boutique or niche publishing house will have smaller sales and thus depress the average. This includes such books as "trail guides in California" and so on, or science books. These non-fiction books are never expected to sell many copies and are marketed for a small or specific audience in mind, and there is minimal or no marketing push. So if you include these non-fiction books by tiny publishing houses, of course, most books sell few copies.
Fiction books by major publishing houses marketed to a general audience and with a significant marketing push are expected to sell a lot of copies, and do. Hence the large advances commonly seen for authors who write these type of books.
I like paper books. I get alot of enjoyment from giving them to friends to read. To me it’s like the difference between when I used to make a mix tape or mix cd and give to someone vs sharing a Spotify playlist.
Also I find that it adds character. Like if someone comes into my house they can see what type of stuff I’m into via my “analog” music movies and books.
Books are a vestigial organ. Nobody uses books as their primary mode of accessing information about the world anymore.
What is interesting is that the cultural mores around this vestigial organ have persisted to such a great degree. Harry Potter Books are a psycho-social mechanism of self-construction more than an actual work of fiction. The phenomenon of "I am a bookish person who reads Harry Potter" as a psychological thing that people do is larger and more significant than the actual story of Harry the young wizard. Likewise, the phenomenon of "I am a successful luminary who has written a book" is more important than the actual content of the book itself. Celebrities paying ghostwriters to write books and going to book signings to sign a book for people who will never actually read the book. A perfectly airtight simulacra.
A big audience means publishing houses don’t have to spend money on marketing
Only blockbuster authors get serious marketing support. For everyone else, big publishers want authors to shoulder marketing and publicity costs and responsibilities. Many lower tier authors are shocked to find they get zero marketing support:
I’d hate for readers to think this happens to every author who signs with a traditional publisher. I have worked with several “Big 5” publishers, and never got even a hint of marketing.
https://janefriedman.com/marketing-support-big-5/#comment-24...
Further, most authors are not experts in publicity or promotion, or have the expertise to run paid marketing campaigns.
This goes a long way to explaining why many books published by the Big 5 sell so poorly.
I would assume that the lack of sales publishers see is directly related to self-publishing and web novels success.
Nice numbers from a self-published LitRPG success: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/1c2a3x4...
Other authors and people on Kindle Unlimited: https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/comments/15o4f5d/ku_payouts_...
> 35 books out of 100 are profitable
I don't think that's right. It's just too good. Imagine that you are an author and maybe you pay one line editor and get beta-readers for free, maybe you do your own cover, and you don't print a large batch of your book and because you are the author, you can't pay yourself an advance. That kind of resourcefulness that a trad publisher can't afford would allow that same 35/100, maybe a little higher, or maybe a little lower, depending on how you do with self-promotion. Still, it means that if you are not a terrible writer, or one who consistently writes stuff nobody wants to read, you will make money with one book out of three. Which I think is too good.
I love reading paper books, I rarely read e-books for the reason that paper books give me more focus!
Just to refute the title: I've sold a dozen of my textbooks in the last two weeks. I bought them almost fifty years ago for my applied physics degree. So some people are buying some books.
But yes of course no one buys most of the books that are published, I don't suppose that Lorrain and Corson sold more than a few thousand copies of Electromagnetic fields and waves (one of the books I sold) and I doubt that they made enough money to pay for the work it must have cost them.
It must be even worse for academic textbook authors nor that many university courses don't even use textbooks any more because they have switched to modular online instruction.
I'm in a very heavy library family; we are checking out and reading a few hundred books per year between all of us.
Yet we still buy a few books, and I bet that if we made an inventory of the books we currently own that are in the house, it would number in the hundreds. But... most were purchased secondhand. I take my daughter to the bookstore every few months; it is always busy. While she is browsing, I also look around. I'd buy half a dozen or more books on each visit if it weren't for the price. At retail price, books aren't a good deal. Even buying a paper copy of a public domain book will run $15-20. Why?
I think at least half of the top level comments didn't read the article, and mistook it for an article about reading habits. It's actually about the number of books that sell well, not the number of readers.
Being mostly into technical books and textbooks, I WOULD BUY BOOKS if the publishers didn't goddamn charge $300 for an undergrad textbook.
I have no love for textbook publishers AND authors. They could all crash and burn for all I care.
The best real analysis textbook I've seen recently by Jay Cummings sells on Amazon for $16. So it is possible to (self)publish books that people can and would buy. Granted that the author probably doesn't live on this book's income, it points out that more affordable solutions can at least exist.
eBay is hands down the best place to buy books.
They're not new, but that's a feature not a bug. The books are more affordable, you're consuming sustainably, and who really cares if a book has been read before?
> The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
This distribution is pretty common in artistic professions and professional sport. A tiny fraction takes most of the pot.
As they say around here, that's a feature and not a bug. In art, people tend to do stuff not because they are looking to earn an income, but they have something to prove or say or show.
I think novels also suffer from a lack of independent tastemakers. Book stores all went out of business, and none of the publishing houses have an identity beyond publishing what sells. I can't think of any book review blogs that have loyal followings, so you end up with the only exposure being pay-for-play. It's really difficult to discover new authors that I like with the current systems.
Interesting article. I have a book still in print, very niche subject. First released in 2013, Amazon mysteriously stoppped stocking it last May, even with recent annual sales of 150-250/yr. Life time print sales are over 1,300 with close to an additional 500 in digital copies.
Hardly a life changer but I've managed to keep the bottom line compensation to $6 per copy, give or take, the entire time so dinner money ;)
To add to the woes of the publishing industry, a lot of sales are lost due to piracy. $300MM a year for the US alone (per a 2019 article).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2019/07/28/us-publish...
So much discussion about children's books, yet they don't mention The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rick Brandt, Ken Holt, Nancy Drew, Dig Allen, Tom Corbett, Dana Girls, Trixie Belden, Donna Parker, Brains Benton, Power Boys, Sandy Steele, Biff Brewster, Judy Bolton, and all the shenanigans of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
Interesting analysis, but it misses one group of authors: those who write books for fun, not profit.
Writing is an effective way to convey your thoughts and ideas. Writing a book has the added benefit of forcing you to plan, prioritize, and edit at a much larger scale. With it comes a greater feeling of achievement. Selling a few copies is a nice cherry on top.
I'm currently writing a book about the What? How? & Why? of Bitcoin.
For me, the gain and street cred I will receive from having completed a book is invaluable to me personally.
I'm writing this book in Dutch, so I really don't expect any sales. Okay, maybe a few if there was another bull-run and frenzy, but that's not why I am writing this book.
If the title is the conclusion you're reaching after reading all the testimony (or whatever it is) then you're probably the kind of person who never buys books. Other than the heavy hitters and back catalogs, there are too many other books for there not to be a long, sparse tail of sales.
I consume a LOT of comics on bittorrent, read them then buy expensive physical editions of the ones i like. That is VERY bad for my wallet (:i consume comics a lot), but it is always a sure shot when going to the comics store.
I consider that to be a win-win situation.
The only major reading I do these days is via audiobooks, I simply read them faster than via visually looking at the page. It might be my attention span, but somehow audio is just faster to literally cram words into the mind at high speed than consciously moving your eyes over a page.
I buy books of all kinds. Paperback, hard cover, audio (rarely), e-book prefer non DRM. In fact, the number of books I buy has not really changed much. I just end up reading more books!
People trade or loan me books. I get electronic ones via many means too.
Many people I know buy books.
Who does not buy books?
I buy used books all the time, sometimes several per month. And I pre-ordered a new book for which I am pretty excited. "Speaking"in universals (the irony of this statement is not lost on me) is unwise.
> Penguin Random House owns Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar intellectual property. The book has been on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list every week for 19 years.
This is insane. To be fair, it’s a fun book. But 19 years?!
One advantage of published books is that they have been through an editorial process, and so are guaranteed to be good (on some dimensions).
Once publishing dies, who will set the quality bar? University presses? Stripe press?
On the flipside, it’s nice that there’s a thriving small and fine press community out there with lots of news press’ appearing over the last few years and some really beautiful books being published.
isnt there a logical twist in all this.. The problem is that there are so many _different_ books. I have a house not exactly filled, but certainly loaded with books. So people certainly buy books. But of each book, I seldomly have more than one or two. It's a bit like random numbers filling the interval 0-1. each number has 0 probability, but they fill out the infinite space 0-1 fully. But how horrible it would be to only have the 10 best selling books. The bible, anyone..
There is a steady stream of tech books being published. Does anyone know what sort of advance a tech author can get, if we leave out the biggest author.
Since years back I already can’t help but keep thinking of paper books as nothing but printouts of text files. (And I no longer want or need printouts.)
I just am old school because I will ALWAYS prefer printed material over digital. I dread the day that physical goods finally vanish.
I buy books but I don't read them anymore....
This is by far the best article that I've ever read about the business aspects of the book publishing industry...
I buy books. I might buy more if more publishers offered titles with lay-flat binding. Computer/technical books especially.
I wish I had gotten to the comment section earlier because the top-level summary of this article is simply incorrect.
The majority of the revenue of the Big 5 publishers may come from celebrities and repeat best-sellers. But the majority of the profit comes from the un-anticipated best sellers: books that the publishers offer low advances but end up going on to vastly out-sell expectations. While some of those books may have ended up in the "anticipated top selling books" category identified in the trial, the point is that their eventual sales are vastly greater than anticipated, for whatever level was offered.
This means that the rest of their publishing business is absolutely not a "vanity project": it is the business of publishing itself. The reason why these publishers have a backlist (older books that earn a profit long after release) is because of the unanticipated best-sellers. The trial data makes it very clear that publishers (and authors) are actually better at pricing the very high-end books and therefore the profits are typically less (because authors have more leverage to get a fair price in their initial negotiations).
So TL;DR: publishers hope to find promising, but under-rated, authors who may potentially go on to become best-sellers. They continue to fund the books of such authors (despite generally not making a profit) because the few that do fund the rest of the business. But (ironically) once such authors are actually established as best-selling franchise authors, those very same authors' ability to negotiate drives profit margins down, which drives the endless search for fresh talent in the publishing industry.
I feel like I finally need to complete my own analysis of the trial results, because I don't think this is well understood.
Here in Germany it seems like people buy a lot of books. Actually people make fun of me for having an ebook reader
Books are, in many cases anyways, an outdated medium. Or at best, a medium that has fierce competition from many other mediums that did not exist for the majority of time the printing press has been around. There's just so many ways to consume fiction today and the barrier to entry is essentially 0. Literature still has its place but that has always been a very small place for the highly intellectual - a limiting factor on its own. Similarly for non-fiction, there's just so much competition from other mediums that frankly, people tend to prefer over books.
People who love reading (I count myself here) will continue to and books will be viable to them. But the vast majority of people only ever read because there wasn't an alternative.
>> Obviously, given the number of people searching on Amazon for products, that gives them a huge advantage because when people go onto Amazon, they—if the book isn’t there for what they are searching for, they could create that book.
This is a really weird thing to say. It seems to assume that people are indifferent to the quality of the writing in the books they read.
In SF libraries are mostly used for clean air during the fire season. Sad but true
I buy books still. Really enjoy that over looking at a screen all evening too.
I can't imagine how I would write essays for university without our library
I have too many books. I physically can't find more places for more books.
Writing is art, just like painting, acting, playing an instrument, etc.. Great hobby. Don't expect to make it a profession. There's a truth behind the phrase "starving artist".
Lottery winners are famous. It's easy to forget that most lottery tickets don't win.
I buy tons of print books on Amazon, probably around 20-30 per year.
And most books that are bought, aren't read.
Yeah. I'm a member of the Furry Writer's Guild and in a few anthologies. This is a discussion that comes up occasionally. The sad fact is a lot of people don't read and furry fandom is pretty niche market to start with. Art and music are a lot easier to consume.
It's really easy to get disillusioned and give up.
Hello, I’m no-one.
Fake news, I bought a book just last week
why should they? libraries, public domain e-books, great online second-hand book selection ...
I have started to buy some technical books again, because the ebook version requires some insane locked down proprietary application to read, or causes the book to self destruct after a few months...
No.
I prefer ebooks for many reasons, and I have purchased thousands of them over the past two decades.
Sometimes a printed book is better for dense technical material. But I'm starting to see textbooks that seem to have been designed as web pages: large x-height, clumsy justification and hyphenation.
No proprietary apps to read a book, please.
When you say “no one buys books” in the title, and then proceed to describe how big publishers don’t make a lot of money from books, you are engaging in disingenuous clickbait.
There are small publishers. There are also print shops. You can design and sell a book yourself. I buy physical books. I bought Greg Egan’s self-published books.
There does exist a real threat to the book market, and that’s LLMs, but as of 2024 the market is far from dead.
Also: publishers aren't needed anymore
They basically make money scumming celebrity crap on the market and riding the 150 years (and counting) copyright window.
With AI floods the editors and reviewers do become more important. But like music labels, one of the biggest exploiters of art and talent, the technical aspects of media delivery and production aren't held by labels or publishing houses.
They are just middlemen.
Because of libraries?
I buy paper books with cash to prevent tracking of my reading habits.
I do
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Fucking books are like museums. 100 year disadvantage.
From the article:
>>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?"
I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local branch even has a Makerspace with 3D printers, laser cutters, sewing machines, and other misc tools.