O’Reilly Radar > The Long Fail of Books

November 2, 2005 by wfzimmerman | No comments

O’Reilly Radar > The Long Fail of Books: “Andrew Odewahn from our Research group recently went to the Bookscan book summit. One of the presentations was on the state of the overall book market, and had this factoid: 93% of all ISBN’s sold fewer than 1,000 units and accounted for 13% of all sales. It’s tempting to think of that as ‘93% of all books are failures’, but that’s not the full story. This being the Third Age of Capitalism and all, success and failure aren’t measured by unit sales. They’re measured by greenbacks, baby: wampum, moolah, shekels, Benjamin Franklins. Cold hard cash (or warm soft cash, so long as it’s cash). Unit sales figures are only part of the equation: cover price and discount to the bookstore are the rest.

Those of you who haven’t dealt with the vagaries of the publishing world before may not know that all books aren’t created equal. Compare Perl Cookbook and Information Visualization: Perception for Design. The former has a cover price of $49.95, but you can buy it for $32.97 on Amazon. The latter has a cover price of $59.95 and you can buy it for $59.95 on Amazon. The difference is because general computer books like Perl Cookbook and textbooks like Information Visualization are sold to booksellers at different discounts. Big distributors like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. get the general books at around half-price but textbooks at about 80% of the cover price. The rationale is that publishers will make up the bigger discount on bigger volumes. Very rare are the textbooks that sell like Robert Ludlum mindcandy.

So without the discount and cover price information, you can’t figure out whether those sub-1,000 books were really failures.

…

These are the questions the tech publishing industry faces as book sales slowly establish a new (lower) equilibrium after the tech bust of the early 2000s: Do we make blogs our long tail of tech publishing and only do bestsellers? How do we balance inventory and demand? Do we price for balance or for opportunity?

This is an important perspective from the smartest company in publishing. Scary stuff for book-lovers. Blogs are great, but they aren’t books.

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