It will be interesting to see what, if any, changes the new PRH CEO Nihar Malaviya will make to the the PRH strategy that has side-lined ebooks for so long.
Amazon has confirmed this week that the August pay-out to self-publishing authors using Kindle Unlimited ebook subscription service is up 10% on last year, per TNPS forecast, at $50 million, per TNPS forecast.
For the pedants, it was actually “only” 9.98%, hitting “only” $49.6 million, but this as Circana Bookscan reported the US print market slowing down.
KU downloads, and indeed all self-published ebook sales on Amazon, and also APub ebook sales and downloads, are not counted by the stats counters that tell us how well the book markets are performing, and the true scale of ebook reading is unknown.
But as we see from the August “pot pay-out”, ebooks are way more popular than many Old School publishers would have us believe, and contrary to the faux wisdom from past PRH CEOs, ebook subscription is very much what the consumer wants.
When Scribd and Oyster brought ebook subscription to the US and UK back in 2014, PRH UK CEO Tom Weldon, was quick to explain it had no future.
“We have two problems with subscription. We are not convinced it is what readers want. ‘Eat everything you can’ isn’t a reader’s mindset. In music or film you might want 10,000 songs or films, but I don’t think you want 10,000 books.”
He was right, of course. Consumers did not want 10,000 books. They wanted millions. Literally. And that’s what Kindle Unlimited offers, and why consumers are handing over enough cash each month for Amazon to pay out $50 million in royalties.
No wonder the PRH leadership has for so long been down on subscription.
In H1 of this year Kindle Unlimited paid out more than quarter billion dollars to self-publishers, uncounted by the AAP and Circana BookScan.
Print is in no danger of floundering, of course, but digital in all its many incarnations is in the ascendancy.
It will be interesting to see what, if any, changes the new PRH CEO Nihar Malaviya will make to the the PRH strategy that has side-lined ebooks for so long.
