Self Publishing 2.0

eReader Sales Outstripping eBook Unit Sales Growth

2012-02-07T15:53:07Z

Jason Green contributes a very interesting analysis of the trend in eReader device sales versus the growth of eBook sales. Over to Jason:

I start by looking at several years of data from Verso Digital and the American Association of Publishers, which understandably, does not include numbers for self published eBooks. Combining data using the last three annual reports from Verso we get the following table for trending the intent to purchase an eReader device among survey participants:

	2009	2010	2011	’09 to ’11 change
Not likely	49%	52.2%	51.8%	2.1%
Not sure	23.1	17.1	16.1	-7.0
Somewhat likely	15.2	15.7	9.9	-5.3
Very likely	9.8	8.2	6.4	-3.4
Already Own	2.9	6.8	15.8	11.9

The last column indicates that Verso survey respondents have acted consistently with their intentions. Nearly 75% of the growth in eBook reader sales has come from those who have said they were “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to purchase an eBook reader in the near future. That leaves a little over a quarter of eBook reader sales going to those who were “not sure” or who received them as gifts. This leaves plenty of room for growth in eBook reader sales, with the ultimate goal being nearly half of the reading population.

But it’s interesting to note that some recent surveys combining eReader and tablet (primarily iPad) numbers have put eReader/tablet ownership at 30%. Does this mean that the vast majority of tablet owners don’t see them as eReaders?

Planned purchases	2009	2010	2011	Est # purchases per device	# Devices at the end of 2011 (% of 94 M)	2011 est eBook unit sales (29% own 94 M devices)	2010 eBook unit sales (10% own 32 M devices)
Not sure	35.4%	16.0%	10.0%	0	9.4 M
0	8.3	22.0	11.3%	0	10.6
1-2	25.4	13.0	15.2%	1.5	14.3	21.4 M	6.3 M
3-4	12.3	10.0	15.6%	3.5	14.7	51.3	11.2
5-9	11.8	14.0	17.9%	7.0	16.8	117.8	31.4
10+	6.8	25.0	29.6%	15.0	27.8	417.4	120.0
						607.9	168.9

So, if those who intended to buy in 2011 actually buy in 2012, and estimating 2011 sales from the AAP numbers ($950MM in eBooks purchased), then the average purchase price was $5.62. Print books have outpaced inflation in pricing for many, many years. So, could the pricing model for eBooks be ‘recapturing’ sales that were lost due to price resistance of the print book? Casual readers who now own devices may be eReading, not just because it is more convenient, etc., but that it is cheaper. In 2010, my estimate is that the average eReader owner intended to purchase 5.3 books; in 2011 that number is 6.47, which seems to contradict some of the ‘power user’ data. Unless, the casual reader is reading more (which is what the data above indicates).

The issue long term is that you can only read so many books, regardless of the format, reader fatigue may already be setting in.

For my baseline comparison of the eBooks to eReader numbers, I considered that the Kindles were the only eReaders used to download and read eBooks. This gives a comparison that while consistent, actually significantly under reports the decay in eBook to eReader growth, since the universe of eReading devices is growing much more rapidly than the numbers of Kindles.

Two more components are missing, the sales of Amazon only kindle self published titles and the 800 pound gorilla in the room–piracy. Using the 2011 planned eBook purchases over the next 12 months data (from the Verso study data above), if those projections and the average price hold, then the 2012 eBook market will be $3.416B in sales, up 260%.

$5.62 average price * 607.9M units projected = $3.416B in sales

BUT, that number is not trending with the sales of books per device. If you use the data below, then I project that eBook sales in 2012 will be $2.44B, which would be 157% increase.

We can estimate Kindle numbers, based on their recent reports and industry estimates. I estimate there were 12MM Kindles sold in 4Q 2011. Based on Amazon’s recent press releases and reports, I break down 2011 Kindle unit sales as follows:

    4Q 11.8M
    3Q   6.8M
    2Q   4.5M
    1Q   3.0M

2011 total 26M units up 189%
2010 total 8M units up 167%
2009 total 3M units

This is close to an IDC study that estimated that Amazon sold 6.2M units in 2010, and that eReader growth was up 143%. So, long story short, I estimate there are 37M Kindles in circulation. Last year, the AAP eBook sales were $432MM; this year the estimate is $950MM.

If *every* eBook was bought on a Kindle, then the following occurs:

2010 $432MM = $39/kindle @ $6/eBook = 6.5 books per device
2011 $950MM = $26/kindle @ $6/eBook = 4.3 books per device

Again, I know there are more eReaders than just Kindles out there. If that growth is figured, then sales per device is even worse and the rate of decay is increasing at an even greater rate. This indicates a few possibilities:

Long term device owners are buying less (they have built up libraries, and need to read those instead of purchase additional titles)
New owners are buying less (early adopters buy more, later adopters buy fewer). If you assume that the 2009 and 2010 owners are buying the same in 2011, then the NEW 2011 owners are only spending $20/device; at $6/eBook = 3.3 books per 2011 device–a significant reduction in sales per device.
Kindle owners are reading more ‘free’ material: library eBooks, lending eBooks, reading .pdfs, free eBooks, etc.

A report given at the Winter Institute indicated that the studies “might include ‘some scary numbers’.” This part of the report is indicative: “The BookStats data indicates that digital growth most notably affected sales in fiction, and, though the volume of eBook sales has increased dramatically, Vlahos said that preliminary data seen from a number of studies suggest that the growth in eBook sales slowed in the second half of 2011′

That is at a time when device sales exploded?

There is a [mis]belief out there that as more people have more devices, that more books will be sold. If that were historically true, then music sales would be at an all time high, since there are more digital music devices than ever. Yet music sales (and per capital consumption) remain low, and could be argued that it has decreased, even with the improvements in technology.

Jason Green is the President of Mardel, Inc., a chain of 35 Christian book stores (and mardel.com), with locations in 7 states in the mid and southwest United States. Jason has been involved with digital content and the shift in consumer behavior in the industry, having been involved with several of the Christian Booksellers Association’s panels, lectures, and events concerning digital content and the changes impacting the industry. Jason is also a student of the history and business of the book industry and a part-time publishing industry analyst.

Marketplace Sellers Provide 2011 Profit For Amazon

2012-01-31T23:27:56Z

Another quick news item. Amazon reported their fourth quarter 2011 earnings today, the headline number for me was captured in this quote from Jeff Bezos:

Our millions of third-party sellers had a tremendous holiday season with 65% unit growth and now represent 36% of total units sold.

I’ve been tracking Amazon Associate sales for over a decade now on my industry book sales page, and while the majority of Associates sales are likely electronics, it’s still a fascinating number. For third party sellers to represent 36% of total units sold is to say that Amazon itself only represents 64% of units sold through the store.

Let’s take a simple example. I’ve been selling through some overstock returns of one of my titles using Amazon, and for each book that I sell for $12.99, Amazon takes $4.27 in fees. That number would drop quite a bit if I paid a monthly fee, but it will always be a positive amount for Amazon. Third party sellers are basically renting virtual space in Amazon’s store.

Amazon reported a total profit of $177 million for the 4th quarter or 2011 and $631 million for the year. Both of these figures are down sharply from 2010. I first wrote that Amazon’s profits were driven entirely by Marketplace two years ago, and those third party sales just keep growing. I estimated two years ago that Amazon total unit shipments for the year were close to 650 million, the last year was probably over a billion units world-wide, with an average price tag of over $40.

So the third party share of unit sales, 36%, should be over 360 million units. If Amazon nets just $2 per Marketplace sale, that’s already more than their reported profit for the year. Amazon is basically eBay with nearly 10X the P/E multiple based on the idea that their money losing retail operations will one day pay off big.

That’s a lot of weight to pile on a little Kindle. Especially when Amazon announced that paper books sales saw double digit growth, 10% or greater. With the overall media sales number up just 15%, that puts a lid on how fast Kindle eBook sales can be growing unless the average price per eBook has been dropping rapidly or the other media elements, movies and music, are steadily shrinking.

Direct from the Author eBook Sales Experiments

2012-02-09T01:10:55Z

I’ve always taken a passive approach to selling my eBooks online. People are drawn to my website by large excerpts from my books and related material, and if they want to buy an eBook, there’s usually an order page link at the top left under an image of the book cover. From 2009 through the first quarter of 2011, I averaged around $20,000 a year in direct PDF sales of books that were also available as paperbacks. I used to do a lot of experimenting with the placement, type size and the wording of links, adding links at the top or bottom of the page. But the main figure of merit I watched was the number of hits on the order pages.

That turns out to be a mistake. The reason I tracked order page hits rather than eBooks sales was that the relatively low volume of sales, averaging five or six a eBooks a day, were too irregular over short periods of time to draw any conclusions. I could go two days without a single sale followed by fifteen sales the next day, that’s just how it works when you’re a small retailer. But after Google’s Panda updates in February and April of 2011 pushed nearly two thirds of my web visitors elsewhere, I found I was more comfortable playing around with my sales approach because I had so much less to lose.

The graph above shows the number of hits on the order page of an eBook we’ll call Title One for two 36 day periods of time. During the first 36 days, the order page drew 287 hits, while during the latter 36 days, it drew 980 hits. The increase was due to my adding a new paragraph to the top of each book excerpt explaining how the excerpt fit in the book and concluding in a link to the order page. So hits on the order page more than tripled, while sales of eBook Title One rose from 21 eBooks to 27 eBooks.

The order page graph above for eBook Title Two shows two equal periods of time during which hits on the order page climbed from 328 to 972. In this case, the change was the addition of a paragraph of text at the very bottom of pages of illustrated procedures, with a link to the order page at the end of the paragraph. Sales rose from 14 copies in the first period to 16 copies in the second period, probably within the margin of error for no change at all.

For the first eBook, the sell-through dropped from 7.3% to 2.8% on the increased order page hits, and for the second eBook, the sell-through dropped from 4.3% to 1.6% on a similar increase. The reason for the lower overall sell-through for the second eBook is that the pages with the order links were not excerpts from the book, they were illustrated procedures on the same subject. Readers are almost twice as likely to purchase a book when they’ve already had a look inside and know exactly what they are getting.

But the main point is that only a tiny fraction of visitors who aren’t actively shopping for an eBook are interested in purchasing one, though a surprising number will check out the details. And the majority of people who are impressed enough with the content to be willing to purchase a book will find the order link without prompting.

Now there is a major caveat, which is that I’ve never used any sales copy on my order pages, they simply present the license agreement, the purchasing button, and a brief explanation of the process. If the order page included an aggressive sales pitch, the sales would probably go up, though it might result in a different set of buyers. An example order page for one of the titles is shown below:

I’ve noticed that if I change my order pages or links too quickly (I’ve experimented with a shopping cart and a more sophisticated check-out process), the orders dry up completely. I think this is because many direct eBook buyers actually visit the site and the order page a number of times before purchasing, these are not impulse buyers. When those pages keep changing, it looks suspicious to the potential buyers who are skittish about making an eBook purchase outside of Amazon, Apple or B&N.

I touched on this subject a few years ago with a post on how a book video increased both direct eBook sell through and Amazon Associates sales, by 14% and 20% respectively. And it wasn’t what you’d call a compelling video. It was shot in one take of me sitting in a ratty chair flipping through the pages and describing the book. No “call to action”, no sales pitch, just an attempt to show people what they would be getting if they bought the book.

I suspect that legitimate eBook publishers like myself are hurt by all the scam eBook sellers on the web who use sophisticated squeeze pages to trick the visitors into purchasing their overpriced garbage. They draw those visitors through paid advertising and black hat SEO. Each one of those buyers will be left with such a bad experience that they are unlikely to purchase an eBook from anybody other than an Amazon, Apple or B&N in the future. In effect, the scammers are poisoning the well for legitimate authors.

Dressing for Self Publishing Success In 2012

2012-01-24T15:09:59Z

Self publishers who feel a little lost in 2012 should take heart in the old rhyme that prescribed for new brides, “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.” The most important part comes first, something old, because it’s the something old that’s been paying the bills and giving me the breathing space to plan ahead. Something old for most of us means publishing on paper, which remained the largest contributor to my self publishing income in 2011.

Low priced Kindle eBooks, which have taken over as the main source of income for many fiction self publishers, are also something old and a proven business model at this point. Practically 90% of the e-mail I get these days I can respond to by saying, “Publish on Kindle first, worry about the rest later.” Maybe I should just set up an auto-responder. But if eBook reader adoption is beginning to saturate, as suggested by some surveys, paper may hold on to the number one spot for nonfiction self publishing for some time.

There are so many options for something new that I think the problem for authors just starting out in self publishing will be not getting distracted and chasing too many goals at once. For example, I have one title that is used as a textbook, and the options for textbook publishing are exploding. The new Apple Textbook option is a perfect match in terms of price and interactive capabilities, and the iPad screen is the ideal size for my flowcharts and color photos. But if Apple requires I sign up all of my eBooks, it won’t be an option. Amazon has been offering textbook rentals on Kindle since last summer, but I don’t publish my flowcharts books on Kindle due to the small screen size of most of those devices.

Something borrowed has been the big buzz in the Kindle universe this month, since Amazon announced the December payout for Kindle Select participants would be $1.70 per title. The main obstacle for self publishers who want to participate in Select is that the titles must be exclusive to Amazon while included in the program. So if you rushed to get your titles set up with Barnes&Noble and Apple , you can’t include them in Select. Kindle Select has proven to be a powerful way for self publishers to get more exposure for their titles and, for 99 cent titles, to earn more money by giving the books away than by selling them!

Something blue for my self publishing efforts has been copyright infringement and the impact it had on the Internet publishing portion of my business. The guide to fighting copyright infringements I published on Kindle last week drew over 600 downloads during its five day free promotion, though Amazon has declined to keep it free in return for my accepting no royalties. In the meantime, I’ve been moving some of the most popular pages off of my FONERBOOKS website, in part to give them a chance to recover from Panda and in part to segregate subjects so it will be easier for me to sell or give away those parts of the business.

My direct eBook sales declined around 70% over the last year due to the loss of website visitors and to higher search visibility for pirated copies. And my Adsense earnings declined to zero last year when I removed ads from my website in protest over Google’s promotion of piracy. Since then, I’ve become a big fan of Google’s DMCA Dashboard, and I’ve seen positive signs that they are finally getting proactive about copyright infringements on some Google properties. For example, they recently disabled a Google Sites account that existed to channel search users to piracy sites after I DMCA’d a single page. I might be better off putting some Adsense back on my non-book pages and saving the money in a special pot for litigation:-)

The wedding day outfit for new brides concludes with “and a sixpence in her shoe.” I can’t think of better advice for self employed authors than to save some money for a rainy day, because partners like Amazon, Apple and Barnes&Noble don’t stay married to the likes of you or me when something better comes along.

Five Days of Free Copyright eBook on Kindle

2012-01-23T15:00:45Z

I just published a copyright enforcement guide for authors and publishers who are fed up with seeing infringements destroy their livelihood. By including the eBook in Kindle Select, I was able to run a five day promotion where it will be free for anybody, providing they own a Kindle or have the Kindle reader installed on their computer, iPad or phone. [update] The free period ran out, over 600 copies were downloaded. I hope to convince Amazon to add the guide to their permanent free collection, sent them an e-mail on Friday.[update]

My preference would have been to simply hand it out as a free PDF, but around a third of the material in the eBook is from blog posts published on this site, and the last thing I need is more potential duplicate content problems with Google. I took a non-traditional approach for what amounts to a how-to book by saving the why-to for the end. The first half of this short guide starts right off with the tools and techniques for fighting online infringements. My assumption is that authors and publishers who are looking for help fighting copyright infringements already know how copyright law works (and doesn’t work), so I wanted to save them a lot of page flipping. The second half of the guide starts with the basics of copyright law and why copyright registration is important, and closes with a discussion of who is driving copyright infringements and how turning a blind eye to online copying can come back to haunt you.

I went with “Version 1.0″ for the edition number since I hope to make this a living guide, updating it on a regular basis as the both Internet and tools for fighting infringements evolve. I’m very interested in hearing feedback about approaches other authors and publishers are trying, and I’m willing to turn the guide into an ensemble piece if that makes sense.

It’s clear to me that the only way authors and publishers can hope to defend our rights is by making our presence felt. In the corporate world in which we live, that means targeting the bottom line of those who enable the business of infringement by forcing them to spend money complying with the law. If the cost of responding to copyright infringement complaints rises above the profits earned through promoting infringements, the corporations who claim their activities are “protecting” the Internet will change their song. They are in it for the money.

[Update] Amazon replied to my request to make the book free:

Due to operational costs, it isn’t possible to select a $0 price for your book at this time.

It went on longer than that, but the first line was all that matters. If you have Prime membership, you can borrow it for free, otherwise it’s going to cost 99 cents unless you wait 90 days for the next five day promo.

http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Internet-Copyright-Infringements-ebook/dp/B006WG0T0W

[ end update]

Kindle Select Pays 1.70 Per Borrowed eBook in December

2012-01-16T16:21:58Z

I rarely do news posts, but this Amazon Press Release is worth announcing.

The top line is that they are paying publishers $1.70 for each Kindle title borrowed by Amazon Prime members in December.

Only 295,000 titles from KDP publishers were borrowed in December. Whether that’s because large trade publishers aren’t in the KDP program or because most Prime members with Kindles never got around to borrowing a book isn’t clear. But my bet is that most Prime members used their free borrow on books from big trade publishers. When you think about it, 295,000 titles borrowed from self publishers is pretty impressive and has no doubt helped many finction writers reach new readers.

Since Prime Members borrowed around 1,800 copies of my eBooks in December, I should earn just over $3,000 for the month. It seems strange to me that Amazon will pay me $1.70 for each $0.99 title loaned out, but a lot of things Amazon does are strange.

Amazon announced that they will raise January’s pot of money to $700,000, up from $500,000 in December.

Cash Advance Model For Self Publishing Fiction eBooks

2012-01-10T14:29:06Z

One key ingredient still missing from the self publisher’s arsenal is the cash advance. Only a miniscule percentage of self publishing authors will see their first novel become the instant hit that removes all economic barriers from their future writing careers. Compare that to moderately fortunate trade authors who stagger from advance to advance until they acheive a hit or the advances dry up. Essentially all self publishing novelists have to finance their writing through day jobs or through family support.

Self published fiction eBooks, especially on Kindle, has become a recognizable business model. But the competition is fierce and the odds against a break-out success are long. As J. Konrath has pointed out on his blog, it can take a long time to break through and begin earning a living from writing fiction, if it ever happens at all. The only advice he can offer is to keep writing and publishing.

The question I’m posing today is whether there’s a solution for self publishers, akin to the traditional publishing industry advance, that can keep promising authors financially afloat and working at their craft until their earnings reach critical mass. This is particularly applicable to the Kindle model, where low priced titles, often anchored by a free or 99 cent loss leader, are the driving factor in raising both the visibility and the eventual income of a self published author. How can fiction authors who get off to a promising start obtain financial backing to give them the freedom to write full-time?

I think one answer could be selling percentage points in the future profit of a given work in progress. An author whose titles on Kindle are generating a reasonable number of sales per month, somewhere in the low thousands of copies at the 99 cent price point, has proven commercial viability without rising above the poverty level. Investors and fans earning 0.01% on bank deposits might be willing to gamble on buying a piece of the profits for that next book, enabling the author work full time at writing.

Assuming that fiction authors would be willing to sell a percentage of the rights to their next title in return for an upfront payment, who would run the market and how would the price per percentage point be set? Perhaps pricing would happen through competitive bidding, which makes eBay auctions an option for conducting the market. But authors would need a method to promote the auction to draw the maximum number of bidders.

A better model for authors to sell shares in their self published fiction would be through existing genre fan sites for science fiction, romance, Christian fiction, etc, which would have to implement the markets for a share of the take. A prospectus for a novel underway would be prepared, including the author’s audited sales history on Amazon for existing titles and the first few chapters of the work in question.

It shouldn’t be too hard to pool micro-investments in future book sales into synthetic securities which couldn’t do any worse than the Wall Street mortgage backed securities. Pooling micro-investments from strangers to buy a percentage of a novel’s eventual profits makes more sense than asking authors to deal with selling fractions of a percentage point of book rights. Fifty casual genre fans tossing in $10 each would create a $500 share, which would be enough to purchase one point of future income from a single title for most struggling authors. The stronger the prospectus, the more fans and investors would be willing to pay, but authors would need to have realistic expectation as well.

If a $10 investment included a free copy of the eBook when it’s completed, it would be a pretty compelling investment compared to keeping the $10 in the bank and earning less than a penny a year in interest. The only complication is that investors might be tempted to give the book inflated positive reviews on Amazon to goose their investment returns, but that’s not really the author’s problem.

Authors with a popular FaceBook page, blog, or legions of Twitter followers might try using PayPal or eBay to sell shares in a future novel direct to their fan base, though I suspect it might be necessary to get legal advice at some point to avoid violating securities laws. Simpler is likely better, so maybe we better skip the synthetic book futures royalties backed securities and not even get involved in the fractional movie rights to Kindle published novels derivatives market. But it may be a good time to buy the domain name FICTIONFUTURES.COM.

Overall, I believe that selling shares in future income from unwritten books could give a whole new meaning to the term creative destruction.

Kindle eBooks Outselling Paper Books Big Time

2012-01-03T21:41:25Z

I originally titled this post, Amazon’s Free eBooks Outsell All Other Amazon Books Combined, but I think people will be more interested in the paid book comparison on the graph. The graph is from my page on Kindle eBook sales which I updated yesterday. The main caveat is that January 2nd isn’t a typical day since many people must have received Kindles and iPads for Christmas and are still excited about buying eBooks. The graph shows paid Kindle eBook sales vs all paper book sales, and I’ll pick a few points off for people who don’t read log-log graphs:First, the oval green data point at the top couldn’t be narrowed down any more because at the time I checked the category bestseller lists, the #2, #3 and #4 bestselling paper books fell between the #21 and #68 bestselling paid Kindle books. So the very top of the curve can move a little to the left or the right but it doesn’t really matter much as we’re only talking about a handful of books that would be affected.

The break-even rank where paper book sales are roughly equivalent to paid Kindle sales doesn’t come until around 20,000. Another way of putting it is that on January 2nd, 2012, the top 20,000 paid Kindle eBooks were outselling the top 20,000 paper books by a wide margin. An easy point to read on the graph shows that the 300th most popular paid Kindle eBook was selling around the same number of copies as the 20th most popular print book, more than an order of magnitude better. The 3,000th most popular paid Kindle eBook was selling around the same as the 750th most popular paper book, four times as many copies. The curves continue to draw together until the cross-over point at around 20,000, where print books of that rank slowly begin selling more copies of paid eBooks of that rank.

The reason I keep referring to paid Kindle eBooks is because free Kindle eBooks are ranked apart from paid. In the middle of the range for the top 1,000 Kindle books, it appears that free eBooks “outsell” paid eBooks by a ratio of more than 5:1 .[UPDATE] Amazon reported last May that Kindle eBooks were already outselling paper books in this press release. But the gap has grown more rapidly than I expected.[UPDATE]

So with paid Kindle books outselling, and I’d say, way outselling paper books, and free Kindle books being five times as popular than paid Kindle books near the top of the curve, it means that “sales” of free Kindle eBooks are greater than all other Amazon book sales combined, at least for the top 10,000 titles or so.

Since availability of free eBooks peters out in the mid tens of thousands, by which point they are pretty obscure, it’s possible that the long tail of all the other book formats adds up to enough to overcome the sales advantage of free. But given the growing use of free Kindle eBooks for promotional purposes on Amazon, I wouldn’t be so sure. I spend the weekend looking at free Science Fiction books on Kindle, and nearly every new popular series leads off with a free title.

Amazon Select raised the number of free titles available in December with their one free copy a month for Prime members program. I’ll write up my conclusions about Select in a week or two, but I can tell you now that a three day free promotion for one of my titles doubled the sales for the three days after the trial, so even though I gave away more copies in a day than I’d normally sell in a month, I sure didn’t lose by it. But I remain baffled by why over 1,500 prime users wasted their one borrow for December on one of my 99 cent eBooks rather than a more expensive title.

It’s all about discovery for self publishing fiction. Give the first one away for free and sell the sequels. Even the trade publishers are figuring it out.

Do Words, By Any Other Name, Smell So Bad?

2011-12-27T14:32:55Z

I’ve been fighting duplicate content problems for many months now, primarily by filing DMCA complaints. What came as a genuine surprise to me is how little “legitimate” copying I detect. An example of borderline legitimate copying would be a site that reworded four of my top drawing pages and redrew the flowcharts that went with them a few years ago. It would have made an interesting copyright infringement case, but I let it slide and it now outranks my site for related searches. Most content theft is cut-and-paste, automated rewrites or quick edits by people who aren’t fluent in English. The snippet below is from one of my illustrated laptop web pages:

And now a rewrite which I assume was automated because the whole page went on in the same vein:

I could easily have knocked down the infringement with a DMCA complaint, but this particular page of mine was so heavily infringed and syndicated that I just got sick of trying. And I’m not convinced that chasing the infringements out of the search engine’s public index removes them from the data pool for analysis. Since the prose was hardly a labor of love to start with, I decided to reword the entire page and abandon the original text to the thieves. Now that paragraph now reads:

This is the sort of activity I swore I’d never waste my time on since it has nothing to do with readers, it’s simply an attempt to get out from under a duplicate content penalty from search engines. It makes good business sense since my self publishing business remains highly dependent on discovery through Internet search, but it’s a miserable state of affairs.

If you’re wondering why so many people stole the text (and sometimes the photographs) from this particular page, it’s because they were trying to promote eCommerce websites selling laptop batteries. They would find my page while searching for content about battery problems, stick in a few keywords related to the brands they were trying to sell, add a link to their website and then syndicate the result on “free” article websites. Everybody involved, the thief, the article website, and the advertising services used by the article website, make money. And as long as they respond to DMCA takedown requests, there’s nothing a self publishing author can do about it.

At this point, my plan is to collect a list of unique phrases from the pages that are most attractive to content thieves and make a point of checking them every week or so, quickly filing complaints in DMCA Dashboard as needed. Maybe it will prevent the unbridled spread that occurred when I left things to take care of themselves for a few years.

Readers Drop Books For Social And Video On iPad

2011-12-20T15:02:26Z

Just a couple years ago the Borders bookstore chain accounted for around one in six trade books sold in the United States. I’m not including textbooks, professional books or religious books here, just the fiction and nonfiction you would expect to find in a bookstore, supermarket or other retailer with bestselling books. Borders is completely gone now, yet watching the sales numbers for Barnes&Noble and Amazon and listening to book retailer buzz at large, it’s beginning to look like a double digit percentage of the book market from the Harry Potter era is simply gone.

If eBook sales were picking up the slack, I wouldn’t bother writing about it since everybody now expects eBooks to replace paper books as the prime distribution method for books in the near future. But eBook sales, as fast as they are growing, aren’t making up for the steep decline in print sales. Who would have believe that in the quarter since Borders shut its doors, book sales at Barnes and Noble bookstores have actually dropped a little?

The title of this post should make it clear that I think those book sales have gone up in electronic smoke. The cold truth is that most trade book reading is recreational, a form of entertainment. Kindle started the fire by proving that reading is an immersive experience of engaging with text. Most readers just didn’t give a damn about book design, font selection, layout, the sensual experience of handling and acquiring paper books that so many pundits were babbling about a few years ago. Readers are in it for the entertainment value and don’t really care how they get it as long as it doesn’t cause eyestrain.

Now, as it turns out, a chunk of the book reading public were readers of convenience rather than vocation. It wasn’t the core properties of a book, a serial presentation of ideas or scenes with a beginning, a middle and an end that made them readers. It was the convenience of having on-demand entertainment that could be taken into the bathroom or enjoyed on a train or in a bed that drove many people to keep reading. Then along came iPad and blew a hole in the time previously devoted to reading books.

Part of the time that would have been spent reading books is now being spent with FaceBook, Twitter and other social media consumption. The balance has shifted to consuming professional video content, films and TV programs. I probably watched a movie a day during the free month of Prime membership that came with my Kindle Fire. I mainly caught up on foreign films, most of which weren’t very good, and I probably pulled the plug on around one in two movies after I started watching. But the point is, I did it sitting in the same chair where I do most of my reading, and in truth, it didn’t feel all that different.

I’m not a candidate for giving up on reading in favor of video, I quit watching TV years ago and the compulsive movie watching was more about getting something of my Kindle Fire while the getting was good, and free. But I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now, fiction sales by unit (print and electronic) have fallen by half over their peak. It may be that the universal adoption of much lower pricing for trade eBooks would slow the process, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The iPad more like a next generation phone that’s bad for making voice calls than an enhanced eBook reader or a stripped down computer. It’s the connection aspect that sells iPads, the quick interface to friends, family and even work, with the added advantage that the iPad version of touch typing gives people an excuse to keep it short. A device that maximizes the instant gratification value that can be derived from your full range of relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate, while offering a storefront for all the professionally produced entertainment you can consume when things get slow.

The iPad isn’t a device at all, it’s a metaphor for modern society.