By Stephen Windwalker
Editor of Kindle Nation Daily ©Kindle Nation Daily 2010
A few arcane tidbits that are bouncing around the Kindle Nation Kranium following Amazon’s press release yesterday on the Kindle tipping point….
You Shouldn’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows. The usually reliable publishing beat reporter Sarah Weinman muddied the water when she picked up on a Publisher’s Marketplace misdirection factoid to the effect that James Patterson’s 867,881 Kindle books sold “accounts for roughly 0.4% of overall sales,” since Patterson has reportedly sold 205 million print copies worldwide. “Each of these authors sell tens to hundreds of millions of print books around the world, so total e-book sales don’t even approach 1% of print sales,” wrote Weinman in reference to Patterson and Nora Roberts, Stieg Larsson, Charlaine Harris, and Stephenie Meyer, each of whom Amazon said have also sold more than half a million Kindle books. Well, sure, but aren’t we gilding the lily a bit here when we omit the contextual information that, for instance, over 50 of Patterson’s novels were published before the launch of the Kindle? Weinman used the present tense in spinning the notion that “total e-book sales don’t even approach 1% of print sales,” and even the most conservative publishers’ statements this year indicate that she’s got to be off there by a factor of more than five.
To the extent that the publishing industry press or industry insiders are offering a perspective that may become the basis for industry strategy, it seems counterproductive if not downright destructive to assemble factoids that lead their audience to miss the basic point here, which is that with each new wave of data the ETA of the tsunami that is the digital publishing transition gets moved up. Major publishers who convince themselves that there was anything insignificant about Amazon’s press release may soon find themselves looking up only to discover the tsunami arrived yesterday. They would be better served listening to industry analyst Mike Shatzkin, who is quoted in today’s New York Times predicting that “within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.”
Taking a Nice Bite of the Biggest New Sales Channel for Kindle Content. One enormously significant possibility that may be lurking behind the various snapshot and relative numbers released by Amazon yesterday is the likelihood that the company’s Kindle app for the iPad may well be blowing away Apple’s own iBooks app in terms of relative sales units and dollars for content. Amazon disclosed that its sales units ratio of paid Kindle books to hardcovers was 143:100 for the second quarter, and then told us that the ratio for the month of June alone was 180:100. While there is a certain amount of guesswork involved in trying to solve this equation for April and May, there would be a tidy and logical symmetry to a rough solution of 106:100 in April, 143:100 in May, and 180:100 in June. The specific numbers are less consequential than a general arc showing month-over-month gains of 25 to 30 percent. A significant portion of this dramatic growth in content sales, of course, would have come from the dramatic growth in Kindle unit sales. But if we keep in mind the difference between a high percentage for monthly Kindle unit sales growth and the much lower percentage gains that this would cause in the installed base of the Kindle hardware, the data is likely to send us looking for an answer to this question: what else changed in the second
quarter? Only a little head scratching should be necessary before it occurs to us that the April 3 launch of the iPad and the Kindle app for the iPad was the other big event, and it may well be that, among that subset of iPad owners who read anymore, the Kindle Store’s 20:1 advantage in non-public domain catalog titles is helping to drive the dramatic increase in Kindle content sales and, possibly, at least temporary dominance of ebook market share on the iPad. I don’t want to speculate that Steve Jobs’ wardrobe range is predictive of his approach as a bookseller, but while there may be retail businesses where carrying an unlimited supply of just a few items works well, bookselling is not one of them.
Sometimes You Find Yourself on Third Base Because You Actually Did Hit a Triple. Some commenters have discounted the fact Amazon said that its ebook sales tripled from the first half of 2009 to the first half of 2010, because the first half of 2009 was the Dark Ages before the ebook revolution really took hold. But Amazon shipped a ton of Kindles (to use the technical jargon) between the February 23, 2009 release date of the Kindle 2 and June 30, 2009. Your humble scribe reached and surpassed the 50,000-copy mark in ebook sales during that period, which, you know, seemed like a lot to me back then in the olden days.
But We Get It Wrong Sometimes, Too. The trick for many of us in the Kindlesphere and beyond sometimes involves our ability to maintain some balance between facts, speculation, and perspective, and I have to include myself there. Reporters like Weinman and Publisher’s Marketplace’s Michael Cader do a great job of unearthing facts from the book trades, but I am sometimes concerned about their apparently willingness to line up factoids that serve their perspective, and perhaps in some cases to give allies a pass on accuracy when those allies offer up misinformed and twisted rants that insult our intelligence, as is the case with Colin Robinson’s current piece in The Nation. Part of my challenge at Kindle Nation Daily, in trying to cover what is important and interesting in the ebook revolution, is to provide facts when they are available and perspective and responsible speculation when it seems meaningful, and I resolve to do a better job of labeling each of these things for what they are in the future. Last week I posted my speculation, with a lot of triangulation based on real numbers that are available to me and some guesses about numbers that aren’t, that Stieg Larsson had reached a million ebooks sold before James Patterson. I even went so far as to guarantee part of what I said, which is pretty stupid, and I got it wrong by about 25 percent. Michael Cader discreetly pointed out my error, and I appreciate him for doing that. Larsson has probably reached a million ebooks sold by now, or is very close to doing so, but like one of Larsson’s main characters, I could do better if I back off the grand speculation now and then, and that’s what I will try to do.
Why Would Amazon Put Out This Release Three Days Before They Report? Despite occasionally strong disagreements and plenty of instances when I have felt young Amazon staffers acted with a certain self-congratulatory sense of dot-com entitlement, I have a pretty positive view of the company, and I own a small amount of Amazon stock. I mean, it would probably be small to you even though it is big to me. I used to own some Apple stock and now I don’t. I should probably find a place to disclose these things somewhere on my blog, and I will effort that later this week. Now, given the fact that one of the first lessons for any investor to learn is that one should never, never, ever fall in love with a stock, you should take anything I say about Amazon stock with a dose of sodium. So I am not going to say much, except that:
- Amazon will release its 2010 Q2 earnings report after the stock market closes Thursday, July 22;
- I will be tuning into the associated conference call that will take place that day at 5 pm Eastern and will be webcast at http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?p=irol-eventDetails&c;=97664&eventID;=3215186; and
- It is my own personal speculation, as I said yesterday, that Amazon’s “press release is tantamount to raising its guidance….”
– An E-Book with All Proceeds to Charity
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