

Kindle Books Now 35% Of Sales When Kindle Version Available - mjfern
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-kindle-sales-now-a-shocking-35-of-book-sales-when-kindle-version-available-2009-5

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tjic
This is interesting, and I'm a big fan of the Kindle, but I think the
statistic somewhat overstates things, because there's a bias in the data: when
someone has a Kindle, they're going to purchase ALL of their kindle material
from the 200,000 items that are available for the kindle. When someone doesn't
have a kindle, they draw their reading material from the long tail.

Imagine that there were just 10 titles available for the Kindle - I bet that
70 to 90% of all copies sold of those titles would be kindle titles.

~~~
briansmith
Plus, those are 35% of _Amazon's_ sales of those books. If you have a Kindle,
you are defintely buying from Amazon; if you're buying paper books, Amazon is
just one of your suppliers.

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mlinsey
I actually suspect that the majority of those are incremental sales (to use
the article's terminology, where "incremental" means ebook sales which aren't
cannibalizing book sales). I suspect this based just on my own anecdotal
experience, but in the absence of hard data that might be the best we can do.

Since getting my Kindle 2 under two months ago, I've bought seven ebooks (and
besides those seven I've also downloaded five more that were offered for free,
usually the first books of multi-part series, but I presume that they're
counting these as part of "sales").

All of those are non-technical books. Prior to my Kindle 2, I bought maybe one
new book every few months, always a technical book. Non-technical books I
would usually buy used (with shipping costs, often around the same price as a
new Kindle ebook, but much more convenient), and only maybe one or two a
month.

One of the huge reasons has been that it is now far more convenient to read
samples. Amazon has always let you read the first chapter or so of lots of its
books, but I've never really used this feature because it would be
uncomfortable to read these samples on my computer and because when I'm
browsing Amazon my mind is in web-browsing mode, which means I'm multitasking
and interacting heavily and am uninterested in even reading blog posts that
are too long, let alone chapters of books.

You are also not allowed to add a Kindle book to your Amazon wishlist. At
first I thought this was immensely frustrating. At first, I thought they put
this in place because you can't yet buy a kindle book for another kindle owner
as a gift, but what I use my wishlist for is to keep track of all the
interesting books I hear about and want to investigate later. Without a
wishlist, what I started doing instead is sending the free sample of the book
to my Kindle. I have now amassed dozens of free first chapters on my Kindle,
and of course when I reach the end of each one, it's only a couple button
presses to buy the full ebook.

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anigbrowl
Interesting, notwithstanding the questionable statistical methodologies.

Asking HN: do you think e-books are overpriced? Several writers I know say
that at most they get the same royalty on a Kindle copy as on paper - or
sometimes less; the excuse being that the whole book has to be re-typeset for
Kindle etc. While arguably valid for some books with complex layout, I find it
very hard to credit for things like novels etc. I sometimes take old public
domain books in .txt form from Project Gutenberg, reformat into more readable
font etc. and output a .pdf for printing or laptop reading. This rarely takes
more than an hour or two, and indeed many public domain or obscure books are
available from Kindle for $0.80.

So I wonder where the money is going when an e-book sells for $9.99 and the
author informs me he's still getting the same ~$0.50 per copy.

~~~
TweedHeads
I've always thought that ebooks shouldn't cost more than 99cts. Perhaps 4.99
for a hot best seller like Harry Potter or something. But paying 10s, 20s or
more is just ridiculous.

One word: GREED

~~~
kqr2
Well, then you might argue that the entire book industry, especially the text
book industry is motivated by greed.

For example, I was able to buy a technical book which retails for $49 on my
Kindle for only $8. Not 99 cents, but it still saved me a lot of money.

[http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Methods-Scientific-
Computing...](http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Methods-Scientific-Computing-
ebook/dp/B000VYSVR4/)

~~~
jimbokun
"Young Madison spends a typical day visiting with friends and family; follow
along to see how she is learning ever step of the way! This book invites
readers to explore the world of learning through the eyes of a child. Find out
how children learn in a variety of different ways as they explore all that is
around them. Discover how learning can occur while baking cookies or while
jumping rope with friends."

Looks like numerical methods are easier than I expected!

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jseliger
How the hell did this get modded up? Notice this quote: "If that's even close
to accurate, it's hard to overstate the importance of it." But we have no
objective way of gauging its accuracy, and this quote definitely doesn't pass
the smell test.

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FlorinAndrei
I'm still holding back, in large part because most of the books I read tend to
be non-mainstream, while the stuff on Kindle so far is largely new releases,
etc.

That will probably change at some point.

