Another Report Short-Changes Self-Published Books

I saw an article that piqued my interest on my Twitter feed a little bit ago, and it got me so steamed I not only commented on the article, I’m gonna break my pattern of afternoon blog posts and blog about it right now.

How resilient of a technology is the print book? http://t.co/WPvSn0uwNW Will it survive as long as the button has?

— Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) September 24, 2013

The article, as most of them do, relies only on data from traditional publishers to come to the conclusion that e-book sales are slowing down. This is not the first time this mistake has been made, and it ticks me off no end.

As I said back in April about the previous report, using only the traditional publishers leaves out a large slice of the book pie. I just did a quick survey of Amazon’s top 20 bestselling Kindle books, and as of this writing*, seven of the top twenty Kindle books are independently published through Amazon Digital Services, including the #2 book on the list. That’s one-third of the bestselling Kindle books, not part of this report’s data.

Using only traditional publishers for data also leaves out independent e-book sales from sites such as Barnes and Noble’s Nook store, BookCountry, and the Kobo store.

This report, like so many, is seriously flawed, and should be taken with quite a few grains of salt.

* Amazon’s Kindle bestsellers are updated hourly, so if you repeat my research you may get a different result.

(cross-posted on Otherwhere Gazette)

Quick Update: As I said above, I commented on the article that started all this on Digital Book World before writing this article. As of right now (2 in the afternoon Pacific time), my comment still has not appeared on Digital Book World’s website. I guess they don’t like dissenting opinions or criticism over there.

For the record, every comment I’ve received so far, except the obvious spam, have been approved, and I expect to continue that unless and until someone gets way out of line. I welcome different opinions, because that’s how we learn, by considering all angles. I guess DBW doesn’t think that way, though.