There is a new book out called Streaming, Sharing, Stealing. One chapter in it contains an analysis of ebooks verses paper books. Specifically, they look at the effect of ebook sales on hardback sales. They were hired by one of the big publishers to do an analysis, so they were working with the real data from the publisher, not the estimated data that is publicly available.
The details are a bit much to post here, so if you are interested, I would suggest getting the book, but basically, they found that ebook sales have no effect on hard back sales. They also determined that if you delay the ebook sales, then not only does that not improve the hardback sales, it decreases the ebook sales. This, of course, implies that Robert Jordan's widow was being counter productive when she decided to delay the ebook version of the final Wheel of Time books so the hardback copies would sale better. When a company delays the ebook release, the customers are more likely to either get the pirated version of it, or simply move on to something else.
Another point they made is that digital sales tends to be a very different animal than non digital sales. One example was DVD verse streaming. For Blockbuster, it turned out that something like 85% of their rentals were a small subset of available DVD's, i.e. the big hits. For streaming, it turns out just the opposite, the titles are much more diverse and the big hits tend to account for a minority of the rentals.
All in all, a very interesting book, one that goes into a lot of detail on the business models and measured consumer behaviors.
The details are a bit much to post here, so if you are interested, I would suggest getting the book, but basically, they found that ebook sales have no effect on hard back sales. They also determined that if you delay the ebook sales, then not only does that not improve the hardback sales, it decreases the ebook sales. This, of course, implies that Robert Jordan's widow was being counter productive when she decided to delay the ebook version of the final Wheel of Time books so the hardback copies would sale better. When a company delays the ebook release, the customers are more likely to either get the pirated version of it, or simply move on to something else.
Another point they made is that digital sales tends to be a very different animal than non digital sales. One example was DVD verse streaming. For Blockbuster, it turned out that something like 85% of their rentals were a small subset of available DVD's, i.e. the big hits. For streaming, it turns out just the opposite, the titles are much more diverse and the big hits tend to account for a minority of the rentals.
All in all, a very interesting book, one that goes into a lot of detail on the business models and measured consumer behaviors.