Archive for September, 2012
Who’s #3 In Online Booksales?—And Why It Matters
Who’s the number 3 most popular online bookseller? The answer is surprising and it says something really important about what motivates people to buy books and where.
First, Define Your Terms
As my grade school social studies teacher used to say, let’s define our terms.
- By most popular I wish I meant sales or units but that information is closely guarded. Instead, the measurement I came up with is website traffic only, specifically unique monthly visitors as reported by Compete.com.*
- Bookstore also wants some definition. New, used, textbooks, eBooks?–I decided to go with all of the above.
- What about online? Online where? United States, India, China? I decided to focus on dotcoms registered to companies based in North America. Continue Reading…
The Death of (the Debate Over) DRM
Smart and smartly written recent posts by Brett Sandusky and Jessie McDougall, and comments by Brian O’Leary following these posts, got me wondering again about the debate over eBook DRM–a debate that has going on for millennia when measured in digital book years. It’s a topic I’ve thought about first as a publisher and now as an industry observer, specifically, “What are the benefits and risks to publishers of going DRM-free.”
Every chance I get I like to ask folks in publishing to explain to me the possible rational(s) for sticking with DRM. The only coherent answer I’ve ever here goes like this:
While it’s true that DRM doesn’t really have anything to do with piracy, that’s really not the question. The question is, would causal file-sharing–which DRM-free eBooks would more readily allow–negatively affect sales.
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