Saturday, January 10, 2015
Real Books making a huge comeback....
It's been widely reported that over the crucial Christmas period sales of physical, you know, actual real books, were resurgent whereas sales of Kindles, certainly at Waterstones, have fallen off a cliff. In any case e-book sales, whilst significant, represent a small proportion of overall book sales. The last reported figures that I've seen suggest that e-book annual sales are around £300 million whereas real book sales are over £2.2 BILLLION. Yes that's billions vs millions. So e-books have a huge way to catch up and it actually appears that sales are dropping off....
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5 comments:
I must be bucking the trend then, as I was given a Tablet, complete with “e-reader”, for Christmas.
Does this now mean I am banned from your shop?
As they say you can prove anything with statistics. Just because the sales of Kindles at one retailer are down proves nothing. The volume that this retail shifts is trivial compared with Amazon. And as Paul illustrated there are plenty of other devices that can be used to read ebooks. Paul with his new tablet may be interested to know that if he belongs to the KCC library he can borrow/download 10 ebooks at a time for free. What is more relevant is that last year ebooks had 48% of the non fiction market.
You may be interested in this week's Guardian article on book sales for 2014. Main point is that in the UK printed book sales by value and volume are both down. Fiction sales have fallen even more than non fiction at the expense of e-book sales.
Give me a real book every time. You can't beat the feel of a book, using bookmarks, etting an instant sense of "how far through the book" you are. Also, real books don't suffer power outages, or file corruptions!
Most modern E-Reader only need connecting to mains electricity about once a month so they are very unlikely to suffer from power outages, even then you can get a power fix from a laptop.
E-Readers also save you pounds in your luggage allowance when you are off on your hols and who needs a bookmark when the E-Reader remembers your place.
E-Readers are also good for reading in bed without the need to put a light on.
Its horse for courses.
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