i have been studying e-books for 3 decades now, which is long enough to know that my instincts were always correct. the reason that's important is because i am confident that i know which variables constitute the major tipping-points. and the fulcrum which might be the most crucial one of all revolves around when the large print-run grows untenable. the logic here is that a good part of the "economy of scale" which large publishers enjoy is due to that large print run. when each copy of a book that you printed costs you a dime -- a quarter at most -- you can afford to spread 'em around. and if it doesn't sell, you can just have the retailer strip off the cover and "throw the book away". why spend any money transporting a 15-cent product back to stack in a warehouse? in that vein, this is interesting:
i'll quote quite a bit, so you get the full impact:
Net sales of those artfully designed, easy-to-hold, pleasant-smelling trade paperbacks slid 18%, to $773 million, in the year through August, compared with the year-earlier period, according to the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, sales of e-books, the second-place format, soared 144%, to $649 million.
ok, so let me give you the deep background on this... according to the figures of the corporate publishers themselves -- their own figures, mind you! -- e-books have nearly gained parity with trade paperbooks, on a _monetary_ basis (which is the only one that really counts to a profit-minded corporation). that is for january-to-august. with trade paperbacks "sliding", and e-books "soaring", it's probably the case that e-books now -- on this november day -- sell _better_ than trade paperbacks. again, this is according to figures from the dinosaurs themselves. this is even more remarkable when you consider that these guys have been dragging their feet for a decade on electronic-books. imagine what woulda happened if they had been really _trying_! the article continues:
Just as telling are reports from inside publishing houses, where more and more often, executives are thinking twice about which hardcover books to reprint in a trade paperback. “It used to be standard operating procedure to do a trade paperback,” said literary agent and former editor Paul Bresnick. “No longer.”
this isn't surprising. if a corporation can't make money at it, they won't keep doing it. making money is their raison d'etre. what _is_ surprising -- or maybe not -- is that if a corporation cannot make money at _something_, it will go out of business. and that is the bigger issue lurking here... it goes on:
Demand is quickly evaporating. According to one executive, the e-book surge has driven No. 1 bookstore chain Barnes & Noble to alter its rule-of-thumb formula for preordering trade paperbacks from publishers. It used to ask for half as many copies as its stores sold in hardcover. Today, the number is down to 30%.
ouch. that's gotta hurt. and it _will_ leave a bruise. a bad one.
At a certain point, the preorders become too small for publication to make sense.
and here we have the coup de grace. can the publishers continue to live on 30% from barnes&noble, instead of the old 50%? maybe yes, maybe no, i don't really know... but the 30% will turn into 25%, then 20%, and at _some_ point soon, it will collapse. 1 year? 3? 5? what difference will it make? when you can no longer make enough sales to justify a large print-run, all of a sudden your 20-cent cost-of-goods measure turns into a $2 cost-of-goods figure, which means the $1 profit you were sticking in your pocket turns into an 80-cent loss. and you go kaput. i've been saying it for over 15 years already, and now the timing of the event is upon us... once the large print-run becomes untenable, the corporate dinosaur publishers go extinct... -bowerbird