I was doing a little reading and concluded that my next books and revisions of my older books need to have print on demand (POD) and ebook availability. I've included some of the articles on the web I was reading for research.
Ebooks reversed a downward sales trend last year by growing due to the pandemic, but print books still held steady and grew too. People like paper even if I do most of my fiction reading on an ebook reader with e-ink. I buy non-fiction books that are reference or art books in paper mostly these days. Anything with pictures chews up too much room on an ebook (I do buy some manga volumes as ebooks if the filesizes are < 150 MB as it is half price compared to the paper book, but cookbooks and some manga are huge now at 300 MB and upwards.
At some point this year I need to seriously look at publishing solutions such as Draft2Digital to allow for ebook and POD simultaneous publishing and on multiple books stores at the same time too! This way I don't have to manage an Amazon, Google, and Apple Books accounts.
The links about these topics are listed below for your reading pleasure.
Why Are Americans Buying Far More Paper Books than eBooks in 2020? Paper is just a great medium and we might even absorb information better in the page turning format!
Print Book Sales Rose 8.2% in 2020
Is Predicted eReader Decline Indicating Reverse Digitization?
Publishers Worry as Ebooks Fly off Libraries' Virtual Shelves. Anyone who can is borrowing ebooks from libraries. Best way to go is the Libby app, but if you don't want to read on an expensive IPAD or a small screen phone, buy a cheap android tablet such as an Amazon Kindle Fire for < $100 and use the Overdrive app if your libraries support these lending methods.
Big Fail for publishers? Just $92 per household spent on rec reading in 2019—and even that may decline long term. This is kind of interesting as books are actually really expensive compared to DVDs / Blu-Rays too if you think about it. How much does it cost to make a series or a movie compared to a novel? Mass market pricing at work for the DVD / Blu-Ray and not for books.
Book Sales Are Soaring—And Not Just the Digital Kind. Pre-pandemic from 2019. Think about what's changed in 2020 and 2021 moving forward.
