Round up #102: Spotify, hardback sales are…
The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.
Meanwhile, back at the tree ranch…
I recently wrote about Simon & Schuster’s sales being up, and noted that there is room in the marketplace for both tradpubs (traditional publishers) and indies (independent publishers).
Is there also room for both hardbacks and e-books?
According to this
that seems to be the case.
Comparing the first four months of this year to the first four months of 2011, adult hardback sales were up 4%.
When we look at children’s/young adult books, the growth in hardbacks was an amazing 78.2%!
The Hunger Games Trilogy certainly gets some credit, although as that link shows, they are also available as e-books.
I find it fascinating that hardbacks are much healthier for children than for adults. I’ve speculated before, but I think it may because many of them are given as gifts, and hardbacks just seem more like a “real” gift than e-books. It may also be that fewer children than adults, relatively, have EBRs (E-Book Readers). That may change to some extent, but I think The Hunger Games trilogy (for example) is a “gateway” series…kids read it who may not otherwise be regular readers. If that’s the case, parents/legal guardians may not have yet invested in an EBR or tablet…although that may come later, especially if the devices become ruggeder and more child-friendly.
See Spotify run…run, Spotify, run!
The Spotify app has come to the Kindle Fire.
If you already have the music service somewhere else, I know that’s very good news.
I wasn’t using it, so I was going to download the app and try it for you…but apparently, you have to have Facebook to sign up. I don’t…I don’t have anything against being on Facebook (which, by population, is the third largest country in the world). I just don’t have the social energy to spend on it. With my family, my work, and my writing, I’m spread pretty thin. 
Of course, according to this
not being on Facebook means that some employers and psychiatrists may hold it against me…since it may make me socially abnormal.
Currently, I either use music I downloaded to my Fire, or one of the following free three apps:
- TuneIn Radio , which lets you listen to broadcast radio stations. I don’t use that very much for music, honestly, although I have used it for Old Time Radio
- Pandora…I started using this on a desktop, and I do like the service. It finds music similar to an artist or song you suggest, and builds “radio stations” around it
- Songza: my adult kid got me started on this one, and it’s a great free app. You are listening to playlists created by other people, but I’ve found them to be good and there’s very little between you and the music. You can choose songs by genres, moods, activities (need something for a formal dinner party, gaming, lying low on a Sunday afternoon? Those are all categories), decades, and more
If you do use Spotify, feel free to tell me and my readers what you think of it by commenting on this post.
In 2011, e-book prices…
fell.
It’s important to note here that this is based on a Bowker Market “Consumer Panel” of 70,000 people. That’s why the significant price drops found here may not match what I see when I do the monthly Snapshots. I just focus on Amazon, and I can’t do a broad based average like that.
The article has some very interesting stats in it, and I suggest you read it. I’ll just mention two things: the average cost of non-fiction e-books in this study went from $9.04 to $6.47 in 2011 compared to 2010, and Gen Ys passed Baby Boomers as the biggest book buyers for the first time.
50 vinyl era albums for $2.99 each
This is a special at Google Play, but Amazon may match it…it won’t last long, though.
The Phonograph’s Birthday: 50 Vinyl-Era Classics at Google Play
There are some great albums in here (well-known albums from Queen, Diana Ross, Meat Loaf, Elton John, KISS, The Police, Miles Davis, The Clash…and more).
Of course, these are MP3s, and if you went for Amazon’s Premium Cloud Player, you could get them at Google and “match” them into your Cloud Player…
Salon: “Social Media Scamsters”
This
is subtitled “Authors are resorting to fake reviews and Internet sock puppets to sell their books. How long can it last?”
This article by Laura Miller is a scathing indictment of the alleged dishonest use of social media to promote books. Miller mentions services you can pay to write reviews for you…and specifically calls out Stephen Leather, who reportedly admitted to posting on forums under several names to talk about the author’s own books. The use of fake identities to promote books is sometimes referred to as using a “sock puppet”…you know, like putting a sock on your hand and pretending to talk to it as though it is a different person, and letting it talk for you.
I should mention, I’ve been an active participant in a couple of threads that Stephen Leather started in the main Amazon Kindle community, where the author gives away a Kindle as various posting targets are hit. I do, though, stop posting when it gets close to a giveaway…I think other people need the Kindle more than I do. I don’t see anything wrong with that, it’s honest.
I’m not okay with people using dishonest means to promote anything. I don’t lie myself (I’ve talked about that before…different people may define that differently), and wouldn’t do it. When I say “I’m not okay”, I should say, “I don’t approve”. However, people can do that…I’m not going to claim that my morality can or should fit everybody else.
I also don’t know that Stephen Leather has done what has been alleged, of course.
I should also say…I’m not great at promoting my books. I’m not going to pretend that I know any marketing secrets, although when I do mention other people’s books, it seems to help them get a few sales.
I think you’ll find the article interesting…
Visual Loop infographics on the e-book market
Thanks to Joe Wikert for the heads-up on this
on English language e-book publishing.
There is a ton of cool data here…I highly recommend it!
For instance, about the same percentage of adults in the USA, Australia, and England have download an e-book…and it’s about 20%. When you think about how few adults are serious readers, that’s a very high number.
As someone with some color vision deficiency (“color blindness”), though, I can’t recommend their infographics for design…and I think they would fail an ADA test. They use color to differentiate values. If they used both color and “texture” (using different patterns for different values), that would be different.
Still, I would consider the data here not to be missed if you are interested in who is reading e-books and how.
Feel free to comment on any of these stories…
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
August 12, 2012 at 4:53 pm |
Your side comment on facebook caught my eye. That was a very nice way to phrase the way I’ve come to view facebook–it’s too much time and trouble to read a lot of drivel that doesn’t interest me much anyway. I keep up with my friends through more personal contact.
August 12, 2012 at 5:10 pm |
Thanks for writing, Louise!
I’m not sure I quite see Facebook that way. I’m always open to contact from people I used to know, and Facebook is a good way to do that. However, I would feel like I would have an obligation to respond to things there…and I just don’t have that social energy. If i was going to go to a party, but knew I would spend the whole time in a corner watching movies on my tablet, it would be more polite not to go at all. I think that’s more of how I feel about it.
I know, though, that some people do see it as antisocial and weird (not being on Facebook). I was very excited to be contacted by some people who really were my social circle a while back…but I really think it was because I’m not on Facebook that we fell right back out of touch. I would have kept responding on e-mail, but that didn’t happen…not saying it won’t, still, but I think there would have been a lot more activity through Facebook.
August 12, 2012 at 9:42 pm |
Add me to the list of folks who have no interest in Facebook. One thing I’ve discovered about trying to “reconnect” with folks from the past is that there was usually a reason why we fell out of contact in the first place.
August 12, 2012 at 9:58 pm |
Thanks for writing, Lady!
Just as I’ve never read a bad book,
I find most people interesting. When I’ve fallen out of contact, there are a number of reasons. For example, I used to do a lot of theatre. In that situation, you get to know people really well…and then you move on to different places. It can be hard to contact theatre people by phone: for a while, my normal sleep pattern was 1-5 in the morning and 1-5 in the afternoon.
I’ll admit, I’m not much of a person to start (or restart) contacting somebody, but I like responding to it when someone else does.