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No one buys books

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Re: No one buys books

#671

Post by grepLeigh »

linuxftw wrote: post #569
al_borland wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm continually shocked by the number of people who forget that libraries exist, and what they are.

It's almost like it's a totally unnecessary public expenditure at this point, and those funds could be used for, IDK, feeding the homeless?

Maybe this isn't as common in your region, but just about every library I've visited provides social services for the homeless.

If you search /r/libraries you'll find first-hand accounts from librarians who are committed to serving homeless patrons, even though they didn't sign up for a social worker role. Honestly, I wish I could allocate MORE funds to those kind of people instead of the grifters who profit from the "homeless industrial complex."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-libraries...

Re: No one buys books

#672

Post by al_borland »

linuxftw wrote: post #664
shkkmo wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I volunteer at my local food bank to help feed to homeless. I understand just how dire the need is. If you spent much deal actually dealing with the homeless themselves, you'd know how crucial a resource a library is for homeless people. For something you see as "dire", you don't seem to have even done anything as simple as google "libraries help homeless." > Libraries are a luxury we cannot afford right now, Compl…

What do you think you've done to sway my opinion on the matter? There's a finite amount of money, and more pressing needs than letting people checkout paper books. Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy. You're choosing to let more people be unfed in or…

Libraries have more than Harry Potter books. They have books that allow people to learn skills that would be valuable in getting a job. There are meeting rooms and events. My local library has a ESL program to help people with their English skills, which can help make them more employable. During the heatwaves last summer they were telling people who couldn’t afford AC to come to the library to escape the heat, which may have saved some lives.

Libraries can help get people to the point where fewer people need the food bank. Maybe you should see what the library actually has to offer before you try to cut it from the budget.

There are so many other areas to find room in the budget without cutting libraries.

Re: No one buys books

#673

Post by no_exit »

nox101 wrote: post #423
j45 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limiting or undermining literacy remains important to those who benefit from it.

what logic leads to this conclusion? I tend to lean to the rising tide lifts all boats. who benefits from illiteracy?

> what logic leads to this conclusion?

Any decent book about Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Re: No one buys books

#674

Post by vidarh »

chromanoid wrote: post #668
vidarh wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Books are bought as web novel or viewed on Kindle Unlimited or in general as self-published endeavors. I've seen no data to suggest this is true at least in the sense it's some sort of major revenue shift. "Traditional" - so non-web novel - type e-books make up about 20% of sales of traditional books, and this has been very slow to change in recent years. As far as I can tell - and this might well be way off, so I'…

Regarding KU, what is your opinion about the numbers here? https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/comments/15o4f5d/ku_payouts_... I think web novel and similar channel revenue is hard to estimate, since Patreon revenue and so on flies below the radar. It is of course still a niche, but I don't think it will stay that way. And I assume publishers see the effects already in consumer behavior. Just look at the Chinese web nove…

You can not assume you can guess read-throughs based on reviews, is my first problem.

It's against their terms to buy reviews, but you still trivially can (and risk getting banned if Amazon suddenly decides to enforce their rules - it's not worth the risk), and plenty of "grey hat" review services exist that costs money and where the provider will "gift" the readers copies bought off Amazon, but where the readers aren't paid, and are at least in theory given instructions that somewhat tries to comply (or pretend to comply) with Amazon's rules. Wouldn't use that either.

If the reviews aren't verified, then ARC (advance reader copies) are also common and accepted by Amazon w/caveats (you need to be very careful about wording, and for KU it's against the terms for you to send the book out while it's exclusive to KU, but you can do it before, or pause KU), and a fairly large percentage who receive ARCs will leave reviews. ARCs is the norm in the publishing industry, and so anyone remotely decently prepared will line up reviewers that have no direct link to sales, and someone with a following somewhere can sometime line up fairly chunky numbers of reviews right off the bat.

But this means the ratio can be far lower. It's likely a lot of the early reviews will have come from free giveaways and early efforts that did not earn the author a single cent and might even have had a net cost.

Without knowing how the author in question promoted their book, it's a guess that could easily be off by a factor of ten. But it could also be better.

$200k is certainly possible. Just rare.

To do well on KU, people also usually focus on maximising page count. That means writing series, and pushing out "box sets" to encourage. It's a very different game from writing standalone novels, and one probably better suited to people already used to the webnovel/serials on Patreon game.

With respect to the Chinese web novel market, my son spends a fortune on it, but it's still a tiny sliver of overall publishing. I suspect it's likely to outpace the growth in the rest of the e-book market though.

Re: No one buys books

#675

Post by tcmart14 »

LargeWu wrote: post #288
johnloeber wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worrying about the environmental impact of books is misguided. You use far more paper products in the course of your everyday life: paper bags, cardboard packaging, paper towels, etc. etc. Even for an avid reader, the impact is negligible.

With paper books I'm more concerned with having to have space to put it when I'm done. But, I find it more enjoyable to read a physical book, and am more likely to re-read it.

That has always been a pain point for me. I read a lot, so having physical copies can turn into a storage problem, especially since I keep a good backlog of books. I may not need a new book now, but I found one at the store that looks really good, so I buy it, place it on the shelf and it enters the queue. Although I did get myself used to using a kindle. Especially when I was in the Navy and needed enough to read for a 7 month deployment.

My current strategy is this. If its a book I know that will have re-read value that I really enjoy. I get a physical copy (such as LOTR). If its an interesting book that I want to read, but I don't see it as having high re-read value, I buy it on my kindle. May not be logical, but its a system that works for me so far.

Re: No one buys books

#676

Post by greedo »

linuxftw wrote: post #664
shkkmo wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I volunteer at my local food bank to help feed to homeless. I understand just how dire the need is. If you spent much deal actually dealing with the homeless themselves, you'd know how crucial a resource a library is for homeless people. For something you see as "dire", you don't seem to have even done anything as simple as google "libraries help homeless." > Libraries are a luxury we cannot afford right now, Compl…

What do you think you've done to sway my opinion on the matter? There's a finite amount of money, and more pressing needs than letting people checkout paper books. Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy. You're choosing to let more people be unfed in or…

You do realize that library budget cuts wouldn't automatically go to housing and feeding the homeless, right? And considering most municipalities seem to treat homeless people as cockroaches, the money would probably go to fund a new sports stadium or as a tax break for some new business.

Re: No one buys books

#677

Post by greedo »

winternett wrote: post #644
grepLeigh wrote: post #332

From the article: >>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?" I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local…

In my city certain people are often using them and leaving... uh... errant trace elements of themselves on said resources, especially the public-use computers... :/ I'm not really a germaphobe, but in the age of the pandemic, I think public resources like libraries are under serious threat, just like busses and public transit. It would be nice if there was some sort of reassurance that cleaning and disinfecting was t…

Lots of libraries let you volunteer if you're so inclined. Also, you can lobby for better library funding so that they can be staffed better. While you're at it, you need to find a better euphemism for homeless/unhomed people...

Re: No one buys books

#678

Post by hinkley »

paxys wrote: post #101

Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. You print books? Well we have e-books now. You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it. You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarte…

Martha Wells had a Patreon for a while before Murderbot Diaries blew up. If I have the story right, the short stories she published there are rolled up in a collected short stories book now.

My kid likes to remind me that Naomi Novik was one of the founders of a fanfic site called AO3.

A number of the books we call classics today started out in serialized form in magazines. Atwood, Capote, Christie, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Doyle, Dumas, Hemingway, Joyce, Sinclair, Verne, Wells, have all done serials that are now bound. And if memory serves Asimov and Clarke as well.

The medium may be different but the process is old.

Re: No one buys books

#679

Post by vidarh »

munificent wrote: post #662
vidarh wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You print books? Well we have e-books now. The vast majority of sales is still paper books. > You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell…

> The vast majority of sales is still paper books. Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie. Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prior…

To sales numbers, you're right that revenue skews it somewhat, but see [1] and [2]. Per 2022, print books added up 788 million sold, while e-books did did 191 million in 2020.

2020 was also a big jump up - in 2019 it was 170, after years of decline for e-book sales from a peak of 242 million in 2014. A large part of that is likely explained by the price gap narrowing, as publisher realised they were leaving money on the table.

> Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).

This is true for almost all self-published books, because realistically your books are not going to be in many - if any - book stores. But most of the best-selling trad published books are. So for self-published authors, focusing on e-books is certainly the way that is most likely to drive actual sales. Sure, you can get some copies into local book stores, and encourage fans to request them elsewhere, but you need pretty decent numbers already to shift that balance without an established publisher behind you.

> The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.

That's true, but somewhat less true for trad published authors where you at least has the shot at getting it into reasonable numbers of book stores. But of course the odds against getting through to a trad published have gotten far worse.

> There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.

That's true, but when it comes to writing the reality is most of us can't hope to live off it anyway, and that creates freedoms we don't otherwise have. E.g. I am not bothering trying to sell individual copies and do book signings or talk to book stores, because I don't need the sales bump it might bring, and so it's all about a balance between keeping it enjoyable and the fun of at least a little bit of recognition and feedback on occasion.

[1] https://wordsrated.com/book-sales-statistics/

[2] https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/

(they don't cite sources, but a quick checks makes it quite clear the numbers come from Statista - some of it behind their paywall)

Re: No one buys books

#680

Post by ddingus »

atoav wrote: post #455
ddingus wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are. Every single public resource is seen as a potential market opportunity being squandered away, or as competition other players do not want to see in play.

Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money. If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want. Sadly many people seem to think they are really showing the folks up there by retreating from any form of self-education once they are out of school. The opposite couldn't be more true.

Yes, I see it playing out the same undesirable and unfortunate way. Great comment.
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