More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Ebook sales down slightly – but IDPF figures are incomplete so are not a reliable indicator
August 19, 2010 | 9:22 am
|
By Paul Biba
The figures from the IDPF show a slight decline in ebook sales in Q2 10, but a huge increase in sales over Q2 09. What a lot of commentators on this subject miss, however, is that the IDPF is very clear about the caveats to these numbers. I will repeat them here:
# The data above represent United States revenues only
# The data above represent only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
# The data above represent only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
# The data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
# The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
In addition, the numbers don’t include books from such operations as Smashwords and free books from Gutenberg, etc. Since these numbers are wholesale price declines will impact them as will.
To date, we have no reliable way of measuring ebook sales as a whole. You can find the IDPF figures here.
|
Related Posts:
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
My ebook purchasing is certainly down in the second quarter, as agency model prices have made many ebooks unaffordable to me. My library card, however, has been used much more often.
@jane_l also points out on The Digital Reader blog that in the switch to agency, profit from the larger publishers has been cut to probably close to half per book. Volume would be a much better indicator here.
Very interesting. I was expecting the growth to slow in Q2 but I wasn’t expecting it to decline. I can’t see how this can be viewed as anything other then an epic fail for agency pricing. The sales of electronic reading devices sure hasn’t declined.
well, all this proves to me is that higher-priced books are not selling as well. Most indies I know are doing as well or better than ever, their numbers are growing as a percentage of overall ebook sales, and thoise numbers are never counted anywhere (and they are no longer negligible).
Scott Nicholson
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com
Gotta ask.
Does the data include the numbers from the long running Webscriptions and Baen Free Library?