Print Vs EBooks: Weeding out the Facts
While Amazon eBook sales now do exceed hardcover sales by a ratio of 1.43 to 1, we should remember that many of those “sales” are 25-cent downloads, many of them are free, and many of them are what, if we saw them in print, could be easily be mistaken for brochures rather than honest-to-goodness books. (Have you noticed every internet marketer seems to have a free Kindle or iPad edition of their latest “free report” these days?) In fact, according to the NY Times, half of the best selling books on Kindle are being given away for free by the publishers. Why? In order to promote sales of the paper versions.(davidweedmark.com)
David Weedmark (@DavidWeedmark on Twitter) weighs in on the digital/traditional publishing debate. Print publishing is far from dead, according to Weedmark, and despite paper and ink’s much hyped funeral dirge, “the print publishing industry is still today the dominant player.” And tomorrow? Weedmark does acknowledge that e-book sales represent 8.5% of overall book sales as of mid-2010, wheres they were only 3% in all of 2009 (according to The American Publishing Association) which would seem a pretty staggering indicator of the change now underway.
