SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
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Yes, People do buy books
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I was wondering especially given that there are fairly good sales for true crime books
What about the balance between the sales of paper books vs ebooks? Aren't ebooks gaining on paper books?
"does not cover... any library sales..." Well that's leaving out a big chunk.
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No one buys books, the state of the publishing industry
SFFBC wrote: "This is in response to the article posted here:No one buys books, the state of the publishing industry"
Thanks for adding the link. The post I linked is actually a response to the post that spawned that thread.
Michel wrote: "What about the balance between the sales of paper books vs ebooks? Aren't ebooks gaining on paper books?"Yes and Bookscan doesn't count ebooks or audio.
I think the salient point is that the court case study was designed to support a point being made about the state of the industry, not an academic study that was just a look at what's happening
This is a bit of a reality check on the article that's gone viral and which is the subject of another thread here. Some key points:
While I think Griffin does great work collecting these quotes, I would offer a word of caution. PRH’s legal strategy was to present publishing as an imperiled, dying industry beset on all sides by threats like Amazon. PRH allegedly even paid high fees to have agents and other industry professionals testify on their behalf. I’m not saying any of the quotes are lies. I’m saying the quotes and statistics are fitting a specific narrative in the context of a legal battle.
BookScan counted 767 million print sales in 2023. BookScan claims to cover 85% of print sales, although many in publishing think it’s much less. It does not capture all store sales, any library sales, most festival and reading sales, etc. (Almost every author will tell you their royalty reports show significantly more sales than BookScan captures. Sometimes by orders of magnitude.)
Still, I’ll be very conservative and assume 85% is correct. This means around 900 million print books sold to customers each year. Add in ebooks and the quickly growing audiobook market, and the total number of books sold over 1 billion. Again, this is the conservative estimate.
Take the "no one is buying books" thing with salt. A fair amount.