
July 2014 Author Earnings Report - srikar
http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-report/
======
stcredzero
Besides time, what's to keep a collective of authors from publishing $3.99 and
below copies of things like college textbooks? I don't mean bit for bit
copies, but newly written works. Also, such books wouldn't be accredited, but
in the long run, that might not matter as much as their being good.

This gets me to thinking: should classes like English still be about
disseminating culture? Or should it be about examining it? I don't think
culture needs disseminating as much as it needs examination anymore.

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PeterWhittaker
I have a hard time distinguishing some of the colours, it would be nice if
hashing or other marking was also used.

Yes, colour confused. Why do you ask? (I perceive some pinks and purples as
grey and my favourite brown shirt is actually green, according to those who
can see all colours properly. I also have a problem with faint red, but bright
red isn't a problem: I've never seen Mars as red, but stop signs and stop
lights are quite a fine, bright red, thank you.)

~~~
ghshephard
Completely off topic, but you might find
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/improving-digital-
experie...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/improving-digital-experiences-
for-color-blind-computer-users) to be interesting.

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bostik
The full report, as linked from boingboing write-up:
[http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-
report/](http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-report/)

Money quote: _" What our data strongly suggests is that DRM harms ebook sales
at any price point."_

~~~
tzs
What would be the mechanism for this?

I can think of three possibilities, offhand.

1\. Buyers prefer non-DRM, and this influences their buying decision.

2\. Buyers of non-DRM ebooks are more likely to lend them or give away copies,
and the recipients them sometimes buy a copy for themselves.

3\. Buyers of non-DRM ebooks are more likely to lend them or give away copies,
and the recipients of them discover a new author that way, and then they buy
OTHER books from that author. Since the decision to use DRM or not tends to be
made by the publisher, the other books by that author are likely to also not
have DRM.

I don't think #1 is likely. I'm sure buyers do prefer non-DRM, but at Amazon
it is not generally obvious if a given book has DRM or not. There are hints,
sometimes. In the product details it sometimes has an entry for how many
copies you can read simultaneously on different devices. If that says
"unlimited", it generally means the book has no DRM. If it says a definite
number, or says that it is publisher-determined, it means DRM.

If you don't know whether or not the book has DRM, it is kind of hard for it
to make the difference in whether or not you buy.

The other reason I'm skeptical about #1 is that I don't think most Amazon
customers have had occasion to run into a problem with DRM, and hence probably
do not even think about whether or not a book has DRM. Amazon has Kindle
reader apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and for OS X and for all
Windows from XP forward. They also have a browser-based Kindle reader that
works in Linux and allows offline reading. This means that most people are not
going to run into one of the primary DRM annoyances--not being able to access
their content on all their devices.

Another DRM annoyance is that it can prevent lending. With physical books, it
was common to borrow books from friends, and people want to do that with
ebooks. Kindle has support for this. The publisher decides whether lending
through the built-in Kindle lending system is supported or not. If they want
to disallow it, they have to use DRM (I think). If the book does not have DRM,
I think it automatically works with the lending system.

I can see that customers might run into this, so that might provide some
reason for them to care about DRM. there might be some preference for non-DRM
on the part of buyers indirectly because the buyers want books that they can
lend. This is the only way I can think of offhand that most users would
(indirectly) notice that a book they are buying has DRM--by seeing that
lending is disallowed. In this case, it is the lending vs. non-lending that
influences the buying decision, not the DRM vs. non-DRM, but since non-DRM is
100% lending enabled, whereas the DRM books are sometimes lending enabled, and
sometimes not, there is a positive correlation between lending enabled and
non-DRM.

They should do an analysis of their data that breaks it down by lending
enabled vs. lending not enabled instead of by non-DRM vs. DRM.

~~~
manicdee
You forgot 4. Sample size is too small to draw meaningful inference from
statistical properties.

The money quote right here: "… the only two price points that appear to buck
the general trend [were] due to 3 outlier DRM titles published by only two
authors."

