Book Selling Trend

"Is it the popularity of e-readers or the struggling economy that is making it harder to sell books?" No. The ebook surge hasn't affected paper book sales as much as you'd think... but is HAS affected attitudes and expectations. People think they can just write a book, publish it for Kindle and become rich/famous... unfortunately, the writing world hasn't changed that much and it's still just a lucky few who hit the big time, as such. It is true, however, that there's no point in going pure paper: when you publish, you really do need both pressings available - paper and electronic. Thankfully, there are ways to do that for free in both arenas, so there's no real loss (apart from the time it takes to reformat for whichever one is unfamiliar!). As an example, the sales of my book are an almost exact 50/50 split between Kindle and paper. There's only ever a one- or two-copy difference between the formats. I think the difficulty in selling comes from there being so much dross in the marketplace. For example, mine's 114 pages long (about 130 in normal paperback size): to me, that's enough text to be a book. But the vast majority of modern "ebooks" I see for sale are 10 pages, thrown together in Word and spewed into a Kindle converter, priced at a couple of dollars and thank you very much... to me those aren't books; they're pamphlets. They're often piles of useless rubbish thrown together in an attempt to get rich quick from the "ebook phenomenon". With so much crap in the market, the real books start to suffer. It's nothing big and scary, the market isn't falling apart or anything, but it does affect sales and the way books are perceived.

I don't write books, but I do watch the market. I suspect it's a combination of things that's depressing book sales. Kindle is very popular and then many people just don't have the money to spend on books right now. Things change and I think paper books are going to be rarer as time goes on.

I have a couple of self-publishers on my FB and they do a LOT of their own promoting and pushing for their books. I am going through an agent for my first book, so I will consider both paper and e-book, because I have friends like me who prefer the paper book, and then friends who use kindle. As for why the market is not good for just paper books? It could be the price, or it could be that some prefer the e-book. Like I mentioned, I prefer a paper book, but it is more expensive, so if I want to buy one, I have to either save up or wait until the price goes down.

I think it is a little of both and mostly the ereaders.

Books on Kindle and tablets is the new normal. But I think ebooks and printed books are essentially different so trying to figure out which is better is a red herring. You need to be able to produce either one or both for different target readers. I haven't published a book yet, but my first book will definitely be written for the Kindle. I just have to figure out what kind of reading goes well with the Kindle. It won't be easy since I'm a programmer/blogger so what I'm familiar with are technical stuff. I don't know if that is good on Kindle.

Actually i do not write the books so i do not know much about book selling but whatever i think the people are not addict to read the books and they like to watch videos or audios at the place to read a book and they do not have enough money to spend on books so this can be a reason..