Peter Hildick-Smith is founder and CEO of the Codex Group. He is talking about how people find books. “We talk to book buyers all day long.” Click on the headline of this post to see the live updates.
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Closing thoughts: Digital retailing has high cost of entry. We’re in a different world. It’s big stakes stuff. Biggest companies playing. eTailer discovery is not working. Bookstores – how much longer? Physical retail works if you protect it, as movie producers protect cinemas. Publishers need to do the same for bookstores.
Discovery methods skew by age. 18 to 24 discover more online than older. Highest discovery by genre online is Young adult fiction and erotic. Author web sites do pretty well. Goodreads showing up , ahead of Pinterest.
Digital Media have highest book buyer reach – 72 percent for Google, Amazon 66%, Facebook in third place. So lots of people go there, but little discovery is happening. Amazon doing a phenomenal job getting 6.6 percent of discovery, biggest single share.
Personal recommendations for books: 11 percent of past book buyers make 46 percent of the recommendations. If you can find them, they are doing a lot of work for you as publishers. “That’s a really good group to know.” Recommendations are 81 percent given face to face. Rest divided among social media (5%) and other. It’s mainly backlist – 94 percent for books published 6 months ago or older.
Online selling accounts for 61 percent of book sales, but only 7 percent of discovery. People found out about the book elsewhere; they go online to buy it. “It’s a really, really serious problem,” Hildick-Smith asserts.
Only one third of past book buyers do NOT own a digital book reading device. They depend on bookstores (and will be the niche Kobo is going after with the ABA deal.)
Online seller discovery for books is up .4 percent, from 6.2 percent to 6.6 percent. Not filling the gap of what’s lost in discovery at bookstores. These busy graphs are giving me a headache.
Discovery of books in stores declines from 32 percent in June 2010 to 20 percent pre-holiday December 2012.
Physical bookstores are still the place where most books bought are discovered. 31 percent of discovery is physical bookseller. Recommendations account for 14 percent. 11 percent is digital discovery. Social networks account for less than 2 percent.
Peter Hildick-Smith should study the Kobo slides for their simplicity and clarity. These graphs are pretty tough to digest in the few moments they’re on the screen. Good info, though.
Almost 60 percent say they are reading digitally now. At December 2012, pre-holiday, Online digital sales are 30 percent, print online sales 31 percent, and only 39 percent in sales.
Since 2007, book industry has been discovered by technology companies. $1.4 billion has been spent on tablet and eReader discovery for iPad, Kindle, Nook, Nexus etc. Titans “piling into our little industry.” Has resulted in skyrocketing adoption of eReader device penetration. Two thirds of people have devices by end of 2012.
Whole new paradigm: publishers have to create ways for readers to discover books in digital setting. Can’t depend on bookstores.
Comments 2
Len, thanks so much for this liveblog! VERY insightful stuff. I wish I was there in person right now, but my teaching schedule (and my paycheck!) meant I couldn’t make it. But some day, I’ll get to DBW and get a chance to meet you and the other insightful people I’ve interacted with online. – Kevin
Posted 17 Jan 2013 at 11:04 am ¶Thanks, Kevin. I really like thenLive Blog plug-in I’ve been using. I hope to see you at one of these confabs sometime!
Posted 17 Jan 2013 at 12:55 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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