3 ms·

Well that seems kind of obvious: Amazon customers already are a very specific subset of all the book sales, and I bet they are far more willing to read an ebook

Well that seems kind of obvious: Amazon customers already are a very specific subset of all the book sales, and I bet they are far more willing to read an ebook than the average book reader. For an article that promises the death of the printed book, I do find it strange that it almost solely focuses on the increase of ebook sales, rather than the decline of print sales. Could there perhaps be a new audience of people who would only read ebooks and no print editions? The only real information provided about this in the article seems to be a quote from an author who assesses he will earn more from ebooks than from print sales in 6 years time, but this is just one example and can depend upon the audience of the author: I bet ebooks will do better for SF fiction than ancient history literature.

BerislavLopac 17y ago
I bet ebooks will do better for SF fiction than ancient history literature Why?
- stingraycharles 17y ago
  Because of the audience: I suspect the average SF fiction reader will be more tech savvy than the average ancient history reader. Since ebooks are a new development, I think it's fair to say that they have a better market penetration with tech savvy people.
  - BerislavLopac 17y ago
    I suspect the average SF fiction reader will be more tech savvy than the average ancient history reader Again, why? The topic doesn't determine the tech-savvyness of its readers, at least not in the way you suggest. Particularly, ancient history is an academic subject, and it will likely follow the general pattern in academia, with younger people being more acquainted with technology (with minority exceptions in both directions). Consider dinosaurs: I don't think there is a less tech-heavy topic (unless the poor dinos used computers, dunno), but I'm pretty sure that a vast majority of people interested in them have been familiar with computers at least since college age.
    - stingraycharles 17y ago
      Ok, well, I guess you could be right, I don't know -- it wasn't really the point of why I mentioned it. As you can see, I used the example SF versus history to illustrate that the sales statistics of ebooks versus print can be different depending upon the author's target audience, which I think is true: I don't believe the percentage sales of ebooks versus print is the same in all categories. When used as an argument why the printed book is dying, we should therefore put the sales numbers from one author in this perspective.

BerislavLopac 17y ago

I bet ebooks will do better for SF fiction than ancient history literature Why?

stingraycharles 17y ago
Because of the audience: I suspect the average SF fiction reader will be more tech savvy than the average ancient history reader. Since ebooks are a new development, I think it's fair to say that they have a better market penetration with tech savvy people.
- BerislavLopac 17y ago
  I suspect the average SF fiction reader will be more tech savvy than the average ancient history reader Again, why? The topic doesn't determine the tech-savvyness of its readers, at least not in the way you suggest. Particularly, ancient history is an academic subject, and it will likely follow the general pattern in academia, with younger people being more acquainted with technology (with minority exceptions in both directions). Consider dinosaurs: I don't think there is a less tech-heavy topic (unless the poor dinos used computers, dunno), but I'm pretty sure that a vast majority of people interested in them have been familiar with computers at least since college age.
  - stingraycharles 17y ago
    Ok, well, I guess you could be right, I don't know -- it wasn't really the point of why I mentioned it. As you can see, I used the example SF versus history to illustrate that the sales statistics of ebooks versus print can be different depending upon the author's target audience, which I think is true: I don't believe the percentage sales of ebooks versus print is the same in all categories. When used as an argument why the printed book is dying, we should therefore put the sales numbers from one author in this perspective.