Analog Books Go From Strength To Strength: Helped, Not Hindered, By The Digital World

from the technology-is-not-destroying-culture dept

Many of the worst ideas in recent copyright laws have been driven by some influential companies’ fear of the transition from analog to digital. Whereas analog formats – vinyl, books, cinematic releases of films – are relatively easy to control, digital ones are not. Once a creation is in a digital form, anyone can make copies and distribute them on the Internet. Traditional copyright industries seem to think that digital versions of everything will be freely available everywhere, and that no one will ever buy analog versions. That’s not the case with vinyl records, and a recent post on Publisher’s Weekly suggests that analog books too, far from dying, are going from strength to strength:

Led by the fiction categories, unit sales of print books rose 8.9% in 2021 over 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Units sold were 825.7 million last year, up from 757.9 million in 2020. BookScan captures approximately 85% of all print sales. In 2020, unit sales were up 8.2% over 2019, which saw 693.7 million print units sold.

The young adult fiction segment had the largest increase, with unit sales jumping 30.7%, while adult fiction sales rose 25.5%. Sales in the juvenile fiction category increased 9.6%.

The two years of increased sales is part of a longer-term trend, as this article from the New York Times in 2015 indicates:

the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

Digital formats possess certain advantages over analog ones, notably convenience. Today, you can access tens of millions of tracks online with music streaming services, and carry around thousands of ebooks on your phone. But many people evidently continue to appreciate the physicality of analog books, just as they like and buy vinyl records. The Publisher’s Weekly article also shows how the digital world is driving analog sales:

Gains in the young adult category were helped by several titles that benefitted from attention drummed up by BookTok, users of the social media platform TikTok who post about their favorite books. They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera, released in December 2018, was the #1 title in the category, selling nearly 685,000 copies.

As a recent post on Walled Culture noted, if publishing companies were less paranoid about people sharing snippets of the books they love, on BookTok and elsewhere, the already significant analog sales they produce could be even higher. If the copyright industries want to derive the maximum benefit from the online world, they need to be brave, not bullying, as they so often are today.

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Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: books, complementary markets, digital paper books, ebooks

Applying A 'Chrome' Strategy To Your Own Business

from the the-flip-side-to-Nicholas-Carr dept

We recently pointed out Nicholas Carr's troubling suggestion that Google was somehow unique in being able to leverage complementary markets to make its core market significantly more valuable. As we pointed out, this shouldn't be unique to Google at all, but should be a key focus for every business out there. Umair Haque has now come along and written what should be seen as the flipside to Carr's piece, looking at how plenty of other businesses can and should leverage complementary markets -- often in extreme ways. As a starting point, he notes how Google's Chrome browser is doing exactly that.

Basically, he starts from the same point as Carr: Google is doing things that don't look to be related to their core business, but those actions significantly influence complementary markets which have the end result of greatly enhancing the core business. Haque sees multiple steps out in terms of how these complementary markets can be applied in many industries, while Carr does not. If the two were playing chess against each other, I'd bet on Haque any day.

For example, Haque throws out a few "radical" suggestions for certain industries:

Imagine what would happen if GM and Ford collaborated to invest in the components and architecture of a better public transport network -- and then licensed it for free to cities, states, and countries.

Imagine what would happen if pharma players directly invested in better hospitals and clinics -- instead of in trying to own the relationship with doctors, and furiously outspending one another when marketing blockbusters.

Imagine what would happen if Wal-Mart invested in town squares and parks -- instead of just in featureless warehouses draining what little vitality remains in already bleak exurbs.

Imagine what would happen if P&G and Unilever invested in people's opportunities for education, global mobility, and meaningful, authentic relationships with others -- instead of just trying to control distribution channels, and then push-market more stuff to you.

Each one of those examples is about radically changing a complementary market, which might not seem to have a direct impact on the primary business, but which would all eventually create a much better primary business -- just as Google is trying to do with Chrome. And, of course, it's not hard to build a framework for how you go about doing this in your own business. It simply requires companies to really understand what business they're in (focusing on the benefits, not the products) and to then understand the complementary markets, recognize how changing those complementary markets shifts around the rest of the market, and then make sure you understand where the money flows if those complementary markets are disrupted.

Google has figured out how to do this quite well, and there are a few other companies who are doing it in less obvious ways -- but there are many more on the way. And, of course, if you want some help in figuring out how to do this in your business, give us a call. We can help.

Filed Under: business models, complementary markets, economics, efficiencies, nick carr, umair haque
Companies: google