As you may remember ebook sales dipped a little from the first to the second quarter. I mentioned this in an article here. One of the possible reasons I mentioned was that perhaps ebook readers were buying from companies like Smashwords whose sales are not reported in the numbers.
Now E-Reads has looked at this and talked to a couple of analysts about it. One suggested that the agency pricing model might have had an effect – causing consumers to rebel against higher prices.
Another suggested that many ereaders were bought for Christmas, causing a huge purchasing boom in the first quarters as the readers were being “topped up” in January and thus causing an inflated demand in the first quarter. Hadn’t thought of this one.
Apple sold 3 million iPads in 80 days during that quarter. Did that not also generate a purchasing boom? Why did the Christmas boom from previous years not cause the same decline.
This was clearly the result of agency pricing and looking beyond that is a huge stretch.
I DO think the Agency model caused e-book sales to drop but obviously can only speak for myself. Before Agency kicked in, I went down my list of potential Kindle buys and bought a lot of them. Later I was glad I did because some jumped a lot afterward and I wished I had bought more. Since then, I have still bought e-books, but with less abandon, and am back to getting from the library some which I would have bought for Kindle. My total number of Kindle books bought has been less, and spending also less. Had the books been priced reasonably, I would have bought more of them. It sounds as if I am better off now than I was; frankly, I would rather have more Kindle books since I prefer them for long-form reading and it is nice to have the font size options. Currently I am reading a library book with smallish print which I can only read in short sessions. If I had this on the Kindle, I could read for much longer. One good thing: I am gradually catching up on the many e-book purchases made before Agency.
Here’s my theory. Agency model titles were yanked out from the original wholesaler sales because those aren’t “wholesale” products anymore.
I can safely say that the agency pricing, and the subsequent changes at Fictionwise dropped my ebook purchases from up to $100/month to near zero. Most of my purchases were discounted and had an effective price of a dollar or two below the cheapest DTB edition, now there is no ebook discounting, which means the ebook price is usually greater than the discounted DTB edition.
Here’s another theory: Fluctuations happen. Do we really need to analyze every little blip?
Don’t forget, ebooks from Penguin, one of the Agency 5, weren’t even available at any price for Kindle for over a month during this quarter. That, and the higher prices (ridiculously higher, in some cases with Penguin), certainly had an impact on my buying, as books that I couldn’t buy for the Kindle I read from the library instead. Others may have taken advantage of Amazon’s aggressive discounting of Penguin hardbacks during this period (as low as $9.99) to just buy paper this time.
I’m reminded of Amazon telling us all how many e-books were sold on December 25th 2009. Well, no shit Sherlock, that’s because everyone was turning on their new Kindle and downloading a book!
Count me among those no longer buying popular fiction under the agency pricing scheme and using the library instead. My Kindle purchases are now all reasonably priced backlist books and indie books. And as an indie author, I think the Pig Five may just have done all of us a favor.