At present, there are three main aspects that impact the book publishing market: electronic catalog, e-book and Print On Demand.
There is a big market along the chain between readers and authors. The author writes a book, the readers read the book, and the whole process generates a lot of cash flow in the process of completion. The typical process in the past can be summed up as follows:
1, (author) need to find an agent, the agent takes a part of the rebate…
2. The publishers, who arranged almost everything, certainly took a big slice of the pie…
The printer, no doubt, had to get his share too…
4, distributors, very important sales channels, otherwise the books sold can not reach the hands of readers…
5, the retailer, hand the book to the reader…
The breakdown of the whole process looks something like this:
1. 10% of the author (in practice, it can vary between 8% and 15%, depending on the author’s reputation, and if the author has an agent, they will take a portion, which can be tough for a new author).
2. Publisher 30% (also varies between 25% and 32%).
3. Printer 10%.
4. 10% of distributors.
5. 40% of retailers.
Amazon, founded by Jeff Beozs, made a big impact on the last part of the chain, the retailers. After years of development, they made some new discoveries.
1. It costs almost as much to have a bookstore on main Street as it does to have it delivered to customers through the sorting and packaging of the distribution center;
2, because the sale is ultimately physical books, so many readers still like to find and browse in bookstores;
In all this competition between Amazon and retailers, publishers are always the winners, and thanks to the long tail of online media, they can still sell portions of their titles for a long time.
But there are three shocks coming. Can the publishing industry withstand them?
1. Digitizing Books by Google Books Search.
2. Thanks to the Kindle, more and more people are beginning to accept e-books.
3. Print as needed.
The first wave was Google Books, which was a revolution. Despite pending legal issues, Google was still playing the Google-style game, which threatened everyone involved in the industry. “As of October 28, 2008, Google announced that 7 million books can be searched through Google Book Search.”
Google books come from three sources: 1. Books that are already in the public domain, but not in print or hard to get outside libraries, are very useful for research, and you can download PDF on Google. Google is paying a lot of money to scan these books, and the current platform is not suitable for advertising, so we can assume that Google is doing this purely for the public good, which is perfectly acceptable; 2. Books that are no longer in print but still receive copyright protection; 3. Some 20,000 books, provided by publisher partners, are only partially available online, with publishers hoping to drive traffic through Google.
None of this is about bestsellers, but Google is constantly doing its job of “directing traffic to the Web” (letting people find what they want in as little time as possible).
The second wave is e-books. With the Kindle, Jeff Bezos finally got rid of distribution centers and trucks. This approach still requires the help of publishers, but he is doing what Steve Jobs is doing, using a terminal device to capture the profits generated by the electronics delivered to the terminal. There are, of course, similar devices on the market, but so are iPod-like devices, and Bezos is betting his future on Kindle loyalty.
So how does the pie chart of profits divide up when Kindle enters this ecosystem?
It’s a good place to start because without authors there would be no readers and there would be no such a huge market (unlike soccer, where they need to cultivate an audience rather than get paid to do nothing). Roy Blount, president of the Authors Guild of America, said: “Serving readers and benefiting authors, [Kindle] has done a great job so far. One problem with the Kindle 2 is that it overhypes the text-to-sound feature. The Kindle 2 can read books, but no one has copyrighted the voice actors.”
This may seem like a trivial Bug, but the important question is:
1. Are e-books really cheap? Not yet. Readers are still demanding lower prices for e-books.
2. Can writers earn more than the traditional 8%-15%? That is possible because traditional printers, distributors and retailers have all but disappeared with the advent of the Kindle.
But in fact, that’s not the case. In terms of Amazon’s Kindle sales strategy, they take a monthly payment, your book sells well and your book doesn’t sell well, and you get basically nothing. In fact, we can take a closer look at Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. At the end of the day, the profits of those printers, distributors and retailers that disappeared went to Amazon, which is a really good thing if you own Amazon stock.
The third wave is printing on demand.
Not everyone is willing to pay $359 for a Kindle, and e-books aren’t necessarily cheaper than printed books. Not all books are available in digital format, and some books don’t fit on the Kindle. That’s where Print On Demand (POD) comes in. This has come about with the development of electronic publishing technology, citation if traditional book printing methods were used to provide on-demand printing services, printers would probably go out of business. POD mainly serves a new long tail: new books that are no longer bestsellers.
Simply put, you can sell your books through third-party media that provide on-demand printing services, and they collect the demand and send it to the printer. For the reader, there is no change in the whole purchasing process, placing an order, paying, receiving the goods. Print-on-demand initially captured a niche market that was not covered by traditional publishers, such as the possibility that no one would buy a book outside their circle of friends or classmates.