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Businesses that remain stagnant don't get shafted so much as outmaneuvered. Instead of investing and pivoting, they cling to the old business model. Short term,

Businesses that remain stagnant don't get shafted so much as outmaneuvered. Instead of investing and pivoting, they cling to the old business model. Short term, their decisions make financial sense, but long term, it's a death sentence. Meanwhile, Amazon is looked at as the behemoth in the industry, yet it probably isn't thought of as an online book store / publisher by most people. I think of so many things before I get to, "Oh yeah, they also sell books." The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.

bigthymer 2y ago
The best survey data I've found for this information is linked here [1]. It breaks data down by age range for those who read at least one book in the prior year. It defines avid readers as having read 50 books/year but doesn't do an age breakdown for this subset. 1 - National Endowment for the Arts - "U.S. Patterns of Arts Participation: A Full Report from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" - <https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts_ParticipationRevised.pdf https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts...>, page 44
treflop 2y ago
I don't think a company that publishes books is going to be able to pivot to building an online book selling platform that easily. They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not built the same.
- Ray20 2y ago
  >They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Doesn't seem to be true. They pay celebrities (for their boring bs books that no one read) enough to build a dozen online platforms
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Well, Amazon started out with almost no capital, so apparently they could have built an online book platform pretty easily. And the capital requirements of selling books online only fell over time as the tech got more widespread. Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselves.
  - youngtaff 2y ago
    In the early days Amazon relied on huge amounts of trade credit from the publishers / distributors Seem to remember that if the publishers hadn’t been lax about Amazon’s delinquent debt the publishers could have forced Amazon into bankruptcy (Worked for a major US technical / educational publishing house in the late 90s / early 00s)
huijzer 2y ago
> The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data. I read a lot of non-fiction books and don't think much has changed over time. For non-fiction you always had groups of people, typically academics and successful business people and politicians, who read tons and tons of books. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, both read many books when they were young in around 1900 to 1930. How many people who worked in factories at the time would have read books? Not many I think. Today it's more or less the same. You have a few people like David Senra or Stephen Kotkin, who read 100-200 books per year, and you have the average person who reads maybe one. Just like book sales, it's a power law.
- leoedin 2y ago
  I suspect I’d read a lot more non-fiction books if I couldn’t access the short form equivalent on my phone readily. But instead I read articles shared on HN or Reddit, with a sprinkling of non fiction books mixed in. Compared to my dad, who devoured non fiction books in the 80s and 90s, my lifetime spend is going to be far lower.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    A lot of non-fiction books--especially in the business realm--have always been a long-form (or short-form) article padded out to book length for publishing economics reasons. And, if you look at the programming realm specifically, a lot of reference books are essentially available online.

bigthymer 2y ago

The best survey data I've found for this information is linked here [1]. It breaks data down by age range for those who read at least one book in the prior year. It defines avid readers as having read 50 books/year but doesn't do an age breakdown for this subset. 1 - National Endowment for the Arts - "U.S. Patterns of Arts Participation: A Full Report from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" - <https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts_ParticipationRevised.pdf https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts...>, page 44

treflop 2y ago

I don't think a company that publishes books is going to be able to pivot to building an online book selling platform that easily. They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not built the same.

Ray20 2y ago
>They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Doesn't seem to be true. They pay celebrities (for their boring bs books that no one read) enough to build a dozen online platforms
mike_hearn 2y ago
Well, Amazon started out with almost no capital, so apparently they could have built an online book platform pretty easily. And the capital requirements of selling books online only fell over time as the tech got more widespread. Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselves.
- youngtaff 2y ago
  In the early days Amazon relied on huge amounts of trade credit from the publishers / distributors Seem to remember that if the publishers hadn’t been lax about Amazon’s delinquent debt the publishers could have forced Amazon into bankruptcy (Worked for a major US technical / educational publishing house in the late 90s / early 00s)

huijzer 2y ago

> The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data. I read a lot of non-fiction books and don't think much has changed over time. For non-fiction you always had groups of people, typically academics and successful business people and politicians, who read tons and tons of books. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, both read many books when they were young in around 1900 to 1930. How many people who worked in factories at the time would have read books? Not many I think. Today it's more or less the same. You have a few people like David Senra or Stephen Kotkin, who read 100-200 books per year, and you have the average person who reads maybe one. Just like book sales, it's a power law.

leoedin 2y ago
I suspect I’d read a lot more non-fiction books if I couldn’t access the short form equivalent on my phone readily. But instead I read articles shared on HN or Reddit, with a sprinkling of non fiction books mixed in. Compared to my dad, who devoured non fiction books in the 80s and 90s, my lifetime spend is going to be far lower.
- ghaff 2y ago
  A lot of non-fiction books--especially in the business realm--have always been a long-form (or short-form) article padded out to book length for publishing economics reasons. And, if you look at the programming realm specifically, a lot of reference books are essentially available online.