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Full article: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2021/04/18/books/book-sales-publishing-pandemic-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2021/04/18/
by BelenusMordred 5y ago
Full article: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2021/04/18/books/book-sales-publishing-pandemic-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2021/04/18/books/book-sal...
I honestly don't see why this is much of a problem? Does the book industry truly need hypebeasts to survive? 4% of your market buying the same paperback in some mass hysteria moment is not sustainable, that's just not how physical books work. Diversity in literature is a good thing, people reading different things is a good thing.
- kasey_junk 5y agoThe book industry (much like many content industries) has always been hit driven. The issue this article is bringing up is the way they diversified that a little and found new hits was via old fashioned on the ground bookstores. We now have pretty empirical proof that the algorithm driven sales via online and big retail sales channels make the industry more hit driven and less diverse. The question now is can brick and mortar stores comeback? After a 20 year decline the stores had stabilized in recent years but the pandemic wrecked them. Too soon to tell but I’m pessimistic for their future, which makes me worry about publishing long term.
- pessimizer 5y ago> The question now is can brick and mortar stores comeback? No. The tax break went on for too long, and that online bookstore became a global near-monopoly on all physical items the size of a coffee table or smaller. Before that, traditional bookstores had already been slammed by grocery-store sized bestseller warehouse chains - the more than a decade long state subsidy to internet retailers actually killed those.
- bennysomething 5y agoAny stats to back that up?
- greenie_beans 5y agoI’m not the commentor and I’m skeptical of that claim too. Here is the place where you wanna go to get information about the industry: https://www.bookweb.org https://www.bookweb.org. You might could dig enough to find answers to all the claims in this thread.
- jeremymcanally 5y agoEven if everyone's prices were MSRP (which they aren't), why pay ~10% more for an item at a local store who has to pay sales tax when I can just order it and have it brought to my door for a lower price? A lot of Amazon's growth (and really any internet retailer) was because of inefficiencies they worked out of the merchandising process, but a lot of it was stuff like not paying sales tax if they didn't have a physical presence in the state which gave them an unfair advantage IMO. That benefit is disappearing as state's are starting to realize the damage to their tax base (FL amazingly being one of those even though we've paid Amazon sales tax for a while since they have a large presence here), but the damage has been done already in a lot of areas.
- ghaff 5y agoAmazon has collected sales tax since South Dakota v. Wayfair.
- dingaling 5y ago> but a lot of it was stuff like not paying sales tax if they didn't have a physical presence in the state Amazon collects sales tax in every jurisdiction outside the USA, yet still had incredible growth. It's not really about prices ( a new book I want is £7 cheaper on ebay ) but convenience.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoWhy just the size of a coffee table and smaller? I bought a massage chair with 2 day delivery from there. And a lot of my larger furniture.
- pessimizer 5y agoI was trying to be conservative, but they also own Wayfair.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoAmazon does not own Wayfair
- pessimizer 5y agoDon't know where I got that idea from.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoYeah especially since Wayfair is a publicly traded company
- herbertl 5y agoA related read to your question: https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/opening-small-town-bookstore-pandemic-craziest-thing-we-ever-did/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/opening-smal...
- lumost 5y agoI’m suspicious that unique content is something that consumers intrinsically value. While the first round of game of thrones is fun, the 5th clone gets pretty old. The question is how do we algorithmically boost unique content without bringing along junk content.
- PaulHoule 5y agoThis beats GoT https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1514753/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1514753/
- tony0x02 5y ago> but the pandemic wrecked them Everything I've read indicates bookstores have done phenomenally well during the pandemic
- jgwil2 5y agoFrom TFA: > Bookstore sales fell nearly 30 percent in 2020, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
- ghaff 5y agoIt wasn't totally clear to me if those were all physical purchases or not. However, it would be shocking if in-store sales weren't markedly down. I basically haven't been in a store casually to browse for over a year and I doubt that's unusual.
- PaulHoule 5y agoThe book industry was not hit driven and it which was more profitable in the early 1960s when the book industry was owned by people who were good at publishing. By the mid-1960's every petroleum and electronics conglomerate had capital that it couldn't put back in its own business, so they started buying other businesses, and publishers were a popular target. Once the publishers were controlled by people who were motivated by money they tried to make more of it but in the process profitability dropped, sometimes below zero.
- kasey_junk 5y agoHere is a thesis that refutes that pretty common narrative https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1281&context=honorstheses https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... Particularly interesting to me is that a) American publishing early on consisted mostly of reprinting foreign hits due to lax copyright b) the 1920s golden age was largely accounted to by macroeconomic trends c) in the 40s publishers got by printing hits for the overseas military and d) even the “modern” publishing industry born in the 50s was subsidized by commercial hits.
- Taylor_OD 5y agoYou are attributing profitability to the industry being "owned by people who were good at publishing" rather than a large variety of things like a rapid and massive increase in the entertainment options available to the average person. Most people do not read for pleasure often. Those who do will most often read hits. Those who read outside of that are a very small portion of the population.
- cronix 5y ago> The question now is can brick and mortar stores comeback? Some never stopped. Powell's (physical) bookstore in Portland is bigger than most city libraries I've been in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_Books
- bobthepanda 5y agoBrick and mortar bookstores I’ve seen that have done well usually have something to keep patrons coming in the door regularly, like live events for the community or a cafe that sells coffee and snacks to consume while leafing through a book. Or they diversify into other fields like stationery where people actually prefer buying them in person sometimes.
- canadianfella 5y agoNeed what?
- buro9 5y agoPower law exists in every industry and the profits from the top sellers do indeed fund the long-tail. This is true of music, books, art, everything. The hits will always be present, and this is OK so long as the underlying businesses continue to invest in the long tail to fund the next generation of writers.
- ChrisRR 5y agoWell you're talking about publishers. But what author can afford to write for months on end, if they only sell 1k copies at £5 each? (I don't know what percentage of that actually reaches the author after publishing)
- TacticalCoder 5y agoIt depends on the publisher but 7% to 9% is common. So for authors selling "only" 5 K copies the only way to survive is to self-publish. Now of course when you self-publish you have to find a way to reach your audience.
- ChrisRR 5y agoDoes that include manufacturing costs? As in, does the author take home 91% of the sale price after taxes?
- slibhb 5y agoIs the article saying that's a problem? If there is a problem it's a form of life being destroyed ("Publishers now worry about the long-term health of physical bookstores"). Reminds me of my father taking me to the local VHS rental place when I was a kid. That's gone now. Bookstores could easily follow. Of course these changes happen due to consumer decisions. It's creative destruction and I wouldn't want to live in a static society. But for people who are attached to the thing that's disappearing, it's a little sad. I've discovered authors by mistake in bookstores. I use Amazon and Alibris all the time but it's not the same as a bookstore.
- PaulHoule 5y agoBookstores are different from "physical stores" in general because books themselves are arguably obsolete. My $50 Fire tablet can hold 1000+ books in PDF form not to mention Kindle format, HTML, etc. It's almost as good as "read a penguin paperback" on the bus or in bed. Go to an academic library and you see the stacks are empty (of people), books rarely circulated, but people are crowded around the computer terminals. (e.g. smart introverts go use the terminal deepest in the stacks) "Books" as a form of literature could survive the end of physical books quite well, just as "Movies" could survive if the theaters never re-opened and it was all direct to video. Contrast that to Lowe's or Kohl's or some other store that sells physical objects that are still in demand. B and N tried the "build a community space with free WiFi" but in our town it became a downmarket version of the public library (another five minutes from the police station) and one day they "kicked the bums out" and as I walked by an Asperger's female with poor hygiene was complaining about it.
- intergalplan 5y agoPhysical books maintain a UI advantage for many kinds of works, which may outweigh their extra storage burden and lack of full-text search. They compete worst (in fact they lose, probably, overall) for ordinary fiction, and other works that use few text features and are mostly linear prose. In favor of ebooks, that category does happen to be a high percentage of all books sold.
- 5y ago
- soapdog 5y agoThe publishers usually survive because of the income generated by large bestsellers. This income is what pays for the books that end up not selling well. The vast majority of books don't sell much, so without the popular books, publishers can't afford to publish. There are many publishers today whose whole operation is basically funded by two or three authors that sell really well. Those earnings offload the cost and losses of the other books.
- gwbas1c 5y agoReading that, it leads me to believe that the best-selling authors are really funding other peoples' hobbies. I wrote a draft of a book around the beginning of the pandemic. At the end, I lost interest and moved on to other things. (The whole idea of trying to get it published looked harder than writing the first draft.)
- CuriouslyC 5y agoNot so much, publishers view the long tail of currently non-bestselling authors as a pile of lottery tickets. Some of those will pay off, and that funds the next pile of lottery tickers, which is the business model.
- gwbas1c 5y agoSo do you think it's worth trying to get it published? I enjoyed writing it until I got to the last chapter. By then I was ready to do something else. Honestly, I'm kinda curious what the "time commitment" is to revise and publish. It probably took me about 100 hours to write the first draft. When I've looked back I see typos, so I assume that putting the polish needed to try to publish it would take at least another 100 hours.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoIt extends to music as well. Consider the acclaimed jazz label ECM. Some of its recordings of more obscure jazzmen sell only a few hundred copies, not even covering production costs. But a Keith Jarrett record will sell so many thousands of copies that it can subsidize other releases on the label.
- rmah 5y ago4% of your market buying the same paperback in some mass hysteria moment is not sustainable, that's just not how physical books work. That's exactly how physical books work. It's always been this way. All media is a hit driven business with a long tail (perhaps with the exception of film which doesn't have much of a long tail).
- Apofis 5y agoJust install the Bypass Paywalls extension: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome (works on Firefox too)