Waterstones has admitted that sales of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader had “disappeared” after seeing higher demand for physical books.
The UK’s largest book retailing chain, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the Kindle in its stores, saw sales of physical books rise 5pc in December, at the expense of the popular e-reader.
Kindle sales had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”, Waterstones said.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to explain this shift in sales. While I think it’s good that people are buying physical books, I think it’s way too early to say that e-books are dead.
Fully cognizant of the fact that anecdotes are not data, here is my little story:
When ebooks first started hitting the virtual shelves, I bought a bunch of Kindle books to replace paper books in my collection. In some cases I bought new books as Kindle versions because there was no alternative: it was paper, Kindle, or go home.
Now I have alternatives, O’Reilly being my first stop for DRM UNENCUMBERED technical books.
I wonder if the general populace are starting to realise the limitations of electronics books? There is no second-hand market, you can’t loan them to friends, so where is the social interaction that used to happen around those functions?
You can’t shift Kindle books to your new non-Kindle reader either.
Agreed. I don’t think a collapse in Kindle device sales means anything about e-books – there are tons of ways to read e-books, including in the Kindle app on iOS as well as Apple’s e-book store. The Kindle device itself is redundant to most people.
My guess is the people who are buying kindles are just not doing it at brick and mortar bookstores.
Business that relies primarily on physical book sales trivialises Kindle sales figures. Hmm.
The thing about ereaders is that you only need one at a time. Is the article talking about ebook sales, or reader sales?
All Amazon hardware will go into the dustbin of history…
Disappearing Kindle sales say as much about e-books as disappearing standalone CD-Player sales say about digitalised music sales. And nowhere in the article is the death of e-books predicted.
I got a hardcover Robert B. Parker Spenser novel a few weeks ago for like 5 bucks. I bought Paul Stanley’s book via Apple store and then had two different people ask me if they could borrow the book, and I had to tell them no because it was an eBook with DRM. So yes, I am part of the general populace starting to question ebooks. However, I also understand that if there was no DRM and all books were pdf format, the amount of money writers make would sink to all-time new lows. And I don’t want to see that happen. Life is compromise.
Nobody’s going to give ebooks for Christmas.
O’Reilly is still in business. They sell very expensive DRM-free books in whichever format you want them: Paper, PDF, ePub, mobi.
At the movie industry experience in Australia has shown, if you give people the opportunity to buy your content, most of them actually will.
If you disobey the Wheaton Directive, you’ll find even the people who would have bought your content, will pirate it instead.
My reading of it is that the article is discussing ebook sales in Kindle format. Waterstones appear to be talking about sales of actual Kindles, but then the article author wanders off into comparison of print versus e-book sales. Somewhere in the middle the Waterstones rep mouths off about e-books.
I wonder if the author (Andrew Trotman) has gotten confused, or is intentionally conflating the two markets?
I can understand why sales of Kindles will have dwindled to nothing: you don’t need to buy a new one with each book.
The answer is likely saturation. Kindle hasn’t innovated enough to create upgrades and the people who read enough AND who like Kindle hardware AND want to be locked into Amazon probably all have a Kindle at this stage. With Kindle software however, I doubt there’s much of a shift. At retail, Kindle hardware is likely selling in a long upgrade cycle while even the most casual once-a-year reader could be buying a physical book.
It’s possible people have just stopped buying their e-book readers in physical stores – especially book stores, where you go with the express intention of buying a real book.
Perhaps people went to the stores to look at the Kindle in the flesh, but now the product has matured people already know what they’re getting.
Everyone is now buying from Amazon direct instead. I mean, where would you get yours?
eBooks have their place. However, paper books offer many things that are part of shared experience that ebooks just don’t address.
I’d like to see seasonal patterns in previous years since it seems entirely possible that physical book sales would increase during the holiday gift-giving season more than e-reader sales, thus taking a larger percentage of overall sales.
It’s easy and relatively inexpensive to give the gift of a book. And it’s not only more expensive but somewhat presumptuous to give a Kindle reader as a gift, since the receiver would need to have an Amazon account and prefer (or at least want) to read e-books.
So, yeah, there will be a few Kindle readers gifted by people who know someone interested in receiving one as a gift, but it seems likely that many, many more physical books will be given as gifts — easily 5% more than typical sales.
I suspect it’s simply a matter of Waterstones’ market and the UK.
I’d be shocked to see the Kindle (especially as a proxy, and the best one in the US market, for “eReaders”) die “in favor of physical books”.
I haven’t bought a physical book that wasn’t a cookbook or art book … basically since I got my Kindle.
If anything kills eReaders, it’ll be “tablets that have enough battery life to be tolerable as readers”.
(I read a little on a cheap Windows tablet, when I left my Kindle at a friend’s house overnight on accident, and the only problem with it was horrible battery life.
I expect it would have been bad in sunlight, too, but that’s not my problem space.)
Actually, you can – shift Kindle books to a new reader. Just not quite legally.
Kindle DRM is trivial to circumvent, and various tools (Caliber, say) can convert formats easily.
(I do so for the perfectly legal reason of having reliable backups that are device-independent.
Morally, if perhaps not legally, there’s nothing wrong with doing it to migrate to a new device, since you paid for the book in the first place.)
Eventually, sure.
But if you could tell me which eInk reader beats the Kindle now…?
(Even apart from the amazing convenience of the Kindle Store, the Paperwhite and Voyage are fine devices, competitive in their market.
I mean, you’re right in every other niche Amazon has tried to compete in, hardware-wise…)
My guess would be that phablets and tablets are replacing dedicated kindle readers. My family has 3 kindle paperwhites that used to see a lot of use, but have been replaced by iPad minis and iPhone 6+’s. Some aspects of reading on the paperweight is better, but I personally much prefer interacting with my iPad. The actual reading works fine on a Kindle, but interacting with it was too painfully slow for me.
I stand corrected. The Kindle has served a purpose, and done the job well (‘ish at times). The phone, the Fire, definitely not so.
I’ve bought stuff from O’Reilly and LOVE the fact that it’s not DRM’d. But there’s a difference between a book publisher who publishes for nerds vs the entire industry going DRM-free. And there’s a huge difference between illegally downloading a movie vs downloading a pdf file. I would love to see a DRM free industry, but what happened to music sales would start to happen with book sales.
Yeah, it would be awful for book sales to go up by 10%, or as much as 40% for older publications in the long tail.
To some degree, the novelty of ebooks may be fading, while nostalgia for printed books might be rising.
I suspect a much bigger factor though is saturation of what is likely to be a relatively small and shrinking niche: everyone who is inclined to buy an ebook reader from a brick-and-mortar bookstore.
Further, now that they’ve purchased a Kindle, they are probably more likely to order an upgrade/replacement online.
On top of that the upgrade rate is likely quite slow. I bought my wife a cheap wi-fi only Kindle a few years ago, and it is still going strong. Most of Amazon’s “innovations” have resulted in making the device less attractive. The higher resolution, higher contrast, and integrated backlight on the Paperwhite is tempting, but they got rid of physical page turning buttons a while ago. The Voyager adds back “buttons” but they really just capacitive touch areas outside the screen, and by many accounts, terrible, plus, its so expensive.
Kindle sales being dead does not equate with ebooks being dead. I just watched a friend switch from a Kindle to an iPhone 6 plus as her book reader. Same as the iPod is dead but people are listening to more digital music than ever. Another friend switched from iPhone 4S and an iPad mini to an iPhone 6 plus that replaced both, as soon as she saw that she could read books on the iPhone 6 plus comfortably.
More and more people today are comfortable with the idea of carrying a computer with them everywhere, whether an iPhone or iPad or Mac or clones of those products, and the batteries and screens have improved to where a Kindle is obsolete.
The thing is, paper books are dead no matter what. The cost of the paper is 60% of the book price, and the cost of the shipping is 30% of the book price. Do the math. The paper books that are published in 2015 will be a small fraction of the number of books and titles that were published in 2005. Something like 25% of paper books will be printed-out blogs.
Then you add bed bugs in the paper books and everybody owning a smartphone and again, do the math.
The article is about the kindle e reader dropping in sales. I suspet it’s as much to do with folks using the app on ipads and android tablets than folks dropping ebooks for paper ones again
That could be a factor also
Actually I did. Because that’s what my nieces and nephews wanted. They didn’t want paper books.
To them it’s the story, not the format that matters. And as military kids packing up an ipad when dad is transferred is a lot easier than packing up scores of books
I don’t think we will see the dead of paper books for another generation or two. And perhaps not even then.
Paper textbooks will likely come first. With it other technical tomes like we have seen with pilot manuals etc. Basically anything that has to be updated a lot. Because those updates are quicker and easier electronically.
Magazines will probably come next.
Then over time paper pleasure reading will die out as kids grow older and do so accustomed to reading off a screen.
Of course “nobody” doesn’t actually mean zero people. The point is physical books make a good Christmas present, so a bump before Christmas doesn’t mean much.