Although these losses have been offset by increases in audiobook and hardback sales, publishers will continue looking to shore up ebook sales, and librarians are certainly hoping that their institutions aren’t once again viewed as scapegoats. However, ebook sales declined10 percent in 2017 versus 2016, according to PubTrack Digital data released this spring. Major publishers have mostly left their library licensing models intact since then, perhaps giving the library field a sense that this issue was settled. These were, in part, the arguments that ultimately helped persuade Big Five publishers such as Macmillan to begin licensing frontlist titles to libraries a few years ago. They don’t realize the lift for discovery and brand development that public libraries contribute to 24 hours a day through their online catalogs and through the 1.5 billion visits into their branches-and I’m just referring to the U.S.” “That’s what they track, most explicitly. In addition, publishers tend to focus too narrowly on hardcover retail sales, Potash argued. Authors and agents aren’t appreciating that libraries are spending hundreds of millions of dollars…in print and digital, which is contributing to their earnings.” Potash said that the publishing industry has long been unaware of the outsized impact that libraries have on sales, because “prior to ebooks, even the publishers never knew which libraries bought their books or how many copies, because were being fulfilled by the traditional wholesale distributors…. “Unfortunately, there is just a lack of appreciation of the great value that authors, agents, and publishers receive by having their ebooks, digital audiobooks, and books available for discovery and potential use in public libraries,” OverDrive founder and CEO Steve Potash told LJ. The decline of chain bookstores has also made public libraries an increasingly important partner for introducing new authors and titles in many U.S. Ebooks now make up 25 percent of all collection materials, as opposed to one percent in 2006. In fact, the IMLS figures show that ebooks in library collections have increased by over 2,600 percent from 2006 to 2015 (the most recent year studied). With the embargo test now impacting eight to ten titles per month, Foy added that it’s “a relatively small slice when you look at all of Macmillan.” Sales and MarketingĪccording to recently released Institute of Museum and Library Services ( IMLS) figures, there are more than 9,000 public libraries and more than 17,000 public library branches in the U.S., When given access to frontlist ebook titles, these institutions purchase a lot of licenses. You don’t have the noise you see in other genres.” Tor has “very stable, repeatable sales patterns among authors and series-a real consistency book to book. “We tried to identify within Macmillan…a stable group of titles, where we could pull them out of the mix, briefly, the overall sales patterns of those books would change at all,” he said. We saw a lot of indicators…of some level of cannibalization in both print and digital from a variety of different channels.”Īs Foy noted, determining the impact that library ebook lending has on the overall sales of a title is difficult to track. However, “we’ve always had some concerns about the impact that might have on other channels.
#TOR PUBLISHING EARNINGS FULL#
Since Macmillan began offering its full catalog of ebooks to libraries in 2014, the publisher has seen “exponential growth” in library channel sales, Fritz Foy, president and publisher of Tor and Forge Books, told LJ last week.
#TOR PUBLISHING EARNINGS LICENSE#
For libraries, the embargo recalled a time less than a decade ago when many major publishers refused to license ebooks to libraries altogether. The publisher said the test would help it determine whether library lending is having a negative impact on retail ebook sales.
In a move that has raised concern throughout the library field, Macmillan in July announced that it would be testing a four month embargo on selling new ebooks published by its Tor imprint to libraries.
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