The missing part is that Apple's maneuver was to effectively destroy the wholesale model in favor of an agency-model, and orchestrate all major publishers to charge more for ebooks just so they can earn their 30% commission from it.
Apple actively engaged as facilitator to help publishers raise prices on the whole market, for a 30% cut.
The result was that books previously available for $9.99 were suddenly sold for $12.99
To highlight the untold level of harm Apple caused, I now realise this event stopped me reading for years.
I loved ebooks and my reading went way up. They were cheaper than paperbacks and cheap enough that I was making curiosity and impulse purchases. The problem with digital sales is that unlike a bookshop, I could not browse and take a book from the shelf and start reading and get hooked.
Once ebooks suddenly jumped in price and absurdly became more expensive than paperbacks, I was done, and didn't buy a book for years. You might try and argue this was irrational, but when I feel I am being scammed, my wallet stays in my pocket. I will indeed cut off my nose to spite an asshole.
Jobs was deeply cynical about ebooks, claiming early on that Kindle would fail because “people don’t read anymore”[0].
There’s some level of irony in the fact that the most successful product from the guy who wanted to build a “bicycle of the mind”[1] ended up being something more like the floating chairs in Wall E.
I just looked and the last Song of Ice and Fire audiobook is 41€ in Apple Books. That is hilariously insane. I could perhaps pay that for all of them but for 1 — the others are basically the same price. That's 200€ for the set.
There are weirdly other audiobook versions that cost only 29€ so I wonder what's the story here.
Audiobooks are just expensive in general. A song of Ice and Fire is $39 in Audible on android (well it's on sale now for $27). Sadly $20-40 is a fairly normal price for a audiobook.
Yeah I think they are though artificially inflated by Amazon and co since why on earth can Audible sell them 8$ every month. Luckily there are a lot of old public domain books that you can listen to. Reading what Brandon Sanderson has to say about Audible to me was really revealing.
It's a professional reading/acting out a full book in a professional studio, with at least an editor, a production team, a corrector. And the market for audiobooks is still very minuscule.
If a band of professional musicians can put out an album with original music and multi-track mixing for $10, a pre-written book with a single voice performer and minimal production crew shouldn't cost multiples of that.
> If a band of professional musicians can put out an album with original music and multi-track mixing for $10, a pre-written book with a single voice performer and minimal production crew shouldn't cost multiples of that.
Not saying this is fair, but musicians often do economically sub-optimal things for the love of creation and because it is a passion. Hopefully, the musician also gets added revenue from concerts.
The voice performance doesnt get the fame nor after-performance revenue -- so naturally they are charging market rates for their time reading. Further, most of the credit/glory goes to the author, not the voice performer. I doubt most people know who the voice performer is on audiobooks.
> the market for audiobooks is still very minuscule
> A song of Ice and Fire is $39 in Audible
Is this really surprising? Production costs for a single audiobook are _significantly_ less than something like a movie, but the audiobook is more than double the cost of seeing a movie?!? I straight up refuse to buy audiobooks based on the price alone. Ebook prices are bad enough, but audiobook prices are ludicrous.
Movies amortize their cost over a much, much larger audience than books do. A book that sells a 100,000 copies is a fairly successful book. A movie that sold 100,000 tickets is a complete flop.
Then add on top that Audiobook sales-volume in total is still smaller than book-sales, that Audible controls the majority of the US Audiobook sales, while the majority of consumption is actually their monthly subscription tier (which probably doesn't pay much at all).
Then Audible takes a revenue-share of 30~50% depending on content, publisher and author also want to earn money,...
Then the audiobook of "A song of fire and ice" is apparently 33 hours and 46 minutes, which is more than 3 times the average length [1], so just the narration production-cost is 3 times higher than the average audiobook.
So overall there's not so much left to make a profit, leave alone break-even.
> Younger people are more likely to consume audio format, as 57% of Americans younger than 50 listened to audiobooks in 2021.
I know I only have anecdata (I'm in that cohort), but that seems off based on my personal experiences and the people I know. Perhaps 2021 was an outlier?
> Over 23% of Americans listened to at least one audiobook in 2021, 15% more than in 2020.
This also seems off. Almost 1 in 4 Americans listened to an audiobook in 2021? That seems... high.
I couldn't find a link to the source data used to generate those statistics.
Based on your link, you'd be looking at something in the range of $24,000 for ASOIAF. Even if you double that you're looking at $48,000. If we factor in 50% (WTF?) rev share with Audible, that's ~2400 units to break even. And then they are clearing ~$20/unit after that. Yeah, I know I hand-waved a bunch of minutia, but my point is that the volume of sales needed to start making a profit, even considering a large rev share, isn't _that_ high.
I can't stack that against sales numbers, but I'll say this, even if it's a legit price based on costs and volume that it doesn't _feel_ legit to _me_. As a result, I won't buy audiobooks. I don't think I'm totally alone. I can't say much past that.
> Based on your link, you'd be looking at something in the range of $24,000 for ASOIAF. Even if you double that you're looking at $48,000. If we factor in 50% (WTF?) rev share with Audible, that's ~2400 units to break even.
That's ONLY production-cost, it doesn't take into account the royalty/license for the actual content-author and the cut the book-publisher takes for "publishing" it. I doubt that the author takes a smaller share just because the book was recorded instead of printed.
If you assume that production cost should make up max. 10% of that revenue (like the actual cost to design a cover and print a book), then the break-even shifts ALOT farther away...
> Yeah, I know I hand-waved a bunch of minutia, but my point is that the volume of sales needed to start making a profit, even considering a large rev share, isn't _that_ high.
Yeah, the scale is indeed hard to estimate, and I can't find ANY statistics on the actual volume-size of the market (actual amount a bestseller Audiobook has sold)
But the stat from the same source stating that "Audiobook revenue accounted for around 3.8% of the book publishing" is an indication that despite glorious growth-figures of the Audiobook industry, the actual market-size is still VERY small even in comparison to the book-publishing market.
AND at the same time, Audible controls ~50% of that market, and drives consumption with Spotify-like flatrate offers.
Making big upfront investments for Audiobook production seems to be a risky call for a publisher then. Unless you have a title like ASOIAF and set the price at 36 USD I guess ;)
Given the lack of source data I can't tell if they talking X listens across Y population, or are they saying that Z individuals listened to at least one audiobook. Do you have some insight from another data source? If not, I stand by my claim that 1 in 4 Americans listening to an audiobook is hard to believe.
From the article in the post I was replying to[1]:
Audiobook production is a multi-step process that requires equipment, software, a studio, and a narrator. Depending on the cost and availability of each of these aspects, the price of producing an audiobook can vary.
* Generally, around 9,300 words of text equate to one hour of audiobook length.
* The average audiobook is around 10 hours long, containing close to 100,000 words.
* The average narrator charges around $200 per finished hour, meaning that the expenses on the narrator will amount to $2,000 for recording an audiobook.
* On top of that, it is necessary to either rent a studio where the recording will take place or invest in the equipment and sound production yourself.
* In either case, producing an audiobook will take between $4,000 and $8,000.
* Some companies offer a complete production service for a fixed price, usually at the $6,000 range.
They are saying it's something on the order of $8,000 to produce a 10 hour audiobook. I tripled that to get to $24k since ASOIAF is a little over 33 hours, then doubled it just to account for things like more expensive voice actors or more expensive production. Keep in mind this was just napkin math to get a general range for what it would cost and I'd rather inflate it a bit just to be safe.
For anyone interested, I think I tracked back to the original study.
Edison Research’s Share of Ear is a quarterly survey of Americans who are asked to keep a detailed one-day diary of their audio usage. Share of Ear utilizes a nationally representative sample of those age 13+. The sample for this study was 4,118
Apple actively engaged as facilitator to help publishers raise prices on the whole market, for a 30% cut.
The result was that books previously available for $9.99 were suddenly sold for $12.99
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-steve-jobs-and-apple-fix...