After four and a half years of floundering around, trying to find a viable business model, Medium has finally chosen one – only it is from the 19th century, not the 21st.

On Wednesday Medium announced its subscription service, which (when it finally launches) will cost $5 a month and give readers access to … something.

The service is in limited beta at the moment, but when it is more widely available subscribers will get access to:

• exclusive content,
• beta access to reading features,
• an offline reading mode.

That really doesn’t look like much; readers already have offline reading modes in apps like Pocket and Instapaper – which coincidentally offer a better reading experience anyway. So Medium isn’t offering much of value – just "exclusive stories from top writers":

As a founding member, your contributions will be used to directly pay writers and publishers. That means new content that wouldn’t otherwise be on Medium—or wouldn’t exist at all. You’ll have access to exclusive stories from leading experts, including your favorite Medium writers, on topics that matter not just today, but tomorrow too.

Basically, Medium is making the same offer as countless other publishers in the past two centuries; pay us for our unique content. (To be fair, a lot of news publishers couldn’t even make that claim; their content was closer to filler than unique.)

Nevertheless, I am in favor of paying for content where it is worthwhile; this is why I have been a paying member of Medium since January 1970.

There was something wrong with their date system, yes.

Snark aside, here’s what I really think:

Finally, the hype bubble has burst.

When it launched in 2012, Medium was pitched as a new and unique solution to the problem of poor content on the web, but it was pretty clear by 2014/2015 that Medium had little to offer that couldn’t be found on just about any other platform.

• Sparse page layout? WordPress had those as optional themes years ago.
• Instant audience through a recommendation engine? Again, WordPress – and social media.
• A simple user interface for writing? Okay, this is nice if you like minimalism, but why bother going to a site’s admin pages to write when Open Live Writer offers an MSWord-like interface (the app works with most blogging platforms, too)?

Nevertheless, the hype persisted in the media coverage of Medium until early this year when Medium laid off a third of its staff and announced that it would be seeking a new solution to its finance problem.

That new solution is quite old, and even in its current web-only incarnation is already being used by a number of other sites, including Pando Daily, Financial Times, The Bookseller, and the NY Times.

And unfortunately, the hype isn’t dead yet; Medium founder Ev Williams still believes it. Here’s what he wrote back in January:

We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention. We believe there are millions of thinking people who want to deepen their understanding of the world and are dissatisfied with what they get from traditional news and their social feeds. We believe that a better system?—?one that serves people?—?is possible. In fact, it’s imperative.

Lofty ideals are great and all, but this is the same guy who pursued these same ideals for five years without stumbling across a business model.

It is past time for an injection of reality. Someone who knows how to turn a profit needs to take over before Medium runs out of money.

image by tvorbaweb-stranok.sk

Some segments of the legacy book publishing had good news in the AAP’s latest month report, but overall the news was bleak.

Trade book revenues were down 7.5% in the month of October, and as a result the industry revenues (for the 1,200 odd publishers which submit data to the AAP) were down 0.7%.

Surprisingly, Adult ebook revenues were up for the month (2.6%) but the format as a whole was still down 17.2% for the year to date.

O O O

Press release:

Religious presses and Childrens & Young Adult Books Publishers’ revenues increased for Oct. 2016 and for the year to-date. Despite those increases, the challenging month for adult books and educational materials resulted in a decline in overall publisher revenues of 9.3% in Oct. 2016 and 6.4% for the year-to-date in all tracked categories (Trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, PreK-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses).

Trade book revenues fell 7.5% in Oct. 2016 vs Oct. 2015, and were down 0.7% year-to-date. The cause of the decline was Adult Books, which was down 13.1% for the month. Interestingly, after 19 months of decline, Adult eBooks grew 2.6% in Oct. 2016 vs Oct. 2015; eBooks, however, remain down for the year-to-date in all trade categories – Adult Books, Childrens/YA and Religious Presses.

Publisher revenues include sales to bookstores, wholesalers, direct to consumer, online retailers, etc.

Trade Books

From Jan. – Oct. 2016 vs. the same time in 2015 trade books were down 0.7% year-to-date.

• By Category:
  • Adult Books were down 3.2% to $3.9 billion
  • Childrens & YA Books were up 4.4% to $1.4 billion
  • Religious Presses are up 7.0% to $401.8 million

• By Format
  • Paperback books grew 6.8% to $1.8 billion
  • Hardback books were flat at 0.2% $2.1 billion
  • Downloaded audio grew 27.3% to $219.5 million
  • eBooks were down 17.2% to $971.4 million

Educational Materials and Professional Books

• Educational Materials had a revenue loss of 8.6% for PreK-12 Instructional Materials and 11.4% for Higher Education Course Materials from Jan. – Oct. 2016 vs. the same time in 2015
• Professional Publishing was down 21.5% From Jan. – Oct. 2016 vs. the same time in 2015. These categories include business, medical, law, scientific and technical books. University presses were down 3.8% for the 10 months.

image by investmentzen

There are many experts who can help authors get published, and now Amazon has gathered all that advice on a single site.

Currently in beta, Amazon Author Insights features the advice of many published authors including Hugh Howey, Joanna Penn, Bryan Cohen, and Elizabeth S Craig as well as a number of articles by Amazon’s staff (under the byline Kindle Press).

The site is hosted on Tumblr, and is divided into three sections: Write, Publish, and Market. There’s also a fourth section which claims to focus on tools and services, but really just lists various Amazon services (KDP, Createspace, Kindle scout, Goodreads, etc).

Amazon has not announced the site yet, and it’s not clear what they’re trying to accomplish here.  But the articles I read all contained sound advice, so the site is definitely worth checking out.

Amazon Author Insights

Amazon rolled out an update today for its iOS app.

The update adds a new sharing option for iOS Safari, enabling readers to easily convert documents and web pages and save them to their Kindle library.

The other new feature is support for Comixology’s guided view, the frame by frame viewing mode which directs readers along the story.

Amazon bought Comixology in 2014, and then integrated the platforms in 2015 so that users could read their  Kindle purchased comics in the Comixology apps. Now apparently the integration goes both ways.

Changelog:

• ComiXology’s Guided View is now available on Kindle! Experience comics in a whole new way with this breakthrough cinematic and immersive reading mode.
• Send to Kindle – Now you can save documents and web pages to your Kindle library. Tap the share button in Safari and add Kindle as a destination. Web pages are converted to Kindle format so you can adjust the text, font and page color, and read on any Kindle app or device.
• Bug fixes and performance improvements.

You can find the app in iTunes.

image by Marcus T Ward

The media is playing an elaborate game of telephone today with the news that the US gov’t may soon require that electronics be limited on flights from, well, Arab countries.

According to the BBC and other sources, passengers will only be able to bring smartphones with them in the passenger cabin:

Airlines from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa will require passengers heading to the US to check laptops and tablets in the hold. The directive is reportedly the result of a security threat and could be announced as soon as Tuesday.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to comment on the issue. "We have no comment on potential security precautions, but will provide an update when appropriate," DHS said in a statement to the BBC.

The Transportation Security Administration, which is part of Homeland Security, also refused to comment.

It is unclear which airlines would fall under the ban and how long it will be in place. But Royal Jordanian Airlines tweeted on Monday that it would ban passengers from carrying on most electronics to and from its North American flights, CNN first reported.

I still haven’t found any reports that this story has been confirmed,  but according to a contact, this is not such a ridiculous idea.

Edit: The Guardian has a screenshot of the original TSA memo, but no explicit confirmation.

"You can fit a bomb into a smaller volume than most people realize," they told me. "Banning large electronic devices from the cabin will mean that the gadgets will go through bomb-detecting scanners before being loaded into the baggage hold."

"Bombs have been found in checked luggage in US airports, and the stories rarely make the evening news," they added.

image by LoadedAaron

Cory Doctorow just announced his support for an ebookstore platform that has me scratching my head.

It’s not just that he has apparently abandoned his support for free Creative Commons-licensed ebooks in favor of selling ebooks (welcomes to 2007, Cory!) but also that he believes that authors should be sales staff for publishers.

From PW:

Walkaway has traditional publishers, and it will have a traditional e-book edition. But I’m going to sell that e-book in a nontraditional way. I’m launching an e-book store with the book, a store that I’ve privately developed for the past three years, code named "Shut Up and Take My Money" (SUATMM). SUATMM is what I like to call a fair trade e-book store, in which the writer also serves as a retailer.

There are many small, niche-oriented e-book stores serving highly specific markets, but SUATMM is different. It’s a retail platform that lets authors with traditional publishers serve as retailers for their those publishers, on the same terms as Amazon, Kobo, Google, BN.com, Apple, and other giants. Those stores have resources no individual author (save, perhaps, the delightfully DRM-free J.K. Rowling) can muster. In particular, they can manage a seamless experience that no indie bookstore can hope to match.

Buying an e-book from a website and sideloading it onto your Kindle will never be as easy as buying it from the Kindle store (though if the world’s governments would take the eminently sensible step of legalizing jailbreaking, someone could develop a product that let Kindles easily access third-party stores on the obvious grounds that if you buy a Kindle, you still have the right to decide whose books you’ll read on it, otherwise you don’t really own that Kindle). But a bookstore operated by an author has an advantage no giant tech platform can offer: a chance to buy your e-books in a way that directly, manifestly benefits the author.

As an author, being my own e-book retailer gets me a lot. It gets me money: once I take the normal 30 percent retail share off the top, and the customary 25 percent royalty from my publisher on the back-end, my royalty is effectively doubled. It gives me a simple, fair way to cut all the other parts of the value-chain in on my success: because this is a regular retail sale, my publishers get their regular share, likewise my agents. And, it gets me up-to-the-second data about who’s buying my books and where.

It also gets me a new audience that no retailer or publisher is targeting: the English-speaking reader outside of the Anglosphere. Travel in Schengen, for example, and you will quickly learn that there are tens of millions of people who speak English as a second (or third, or fourth) language, and nevertheless speak it better than you ever will. Yet there is no reliable way for these English-preferring readers, who value the writer’s original words, unfiltered by translation, to source legal e-books in English.

Amazon and its competitors typically refuse outright to deal with these customers, unable to determine which publisher has the right to sell to them. Most publishing contracts declare these nominally non-English-speaking places to be "open territory" where in theory all of the book’s publishers may compete, but in practice, none of them do.

Even in the Anglosphere, readers are often left to their own devices. Told that Amazon U.S. can’t sell the book to them, they must discover for themselves where to find the book on Amazon U.K. But acting as my own retailer, I can easily determine who gets the publisher’s end of the payment: in the U.S. and Canada, it’s Tor; in the U.K. and the Commonwealth, it’s Head of Zeus. Everywhere else—all that open territory—it’s me.

For the other defined territories, it’s a simple matter of calculating the remittances and sending payments and statements to my other publishers, just like any other retailer. The difference being that rather than my publishers sending me 25% of the money due twice a year in the form of a royalty check, I am in control of the money.

In case you are wondering, Doctorow is apparently talking about BookGrail, the (Gumroad slash Aer.io) platform from UK publisher Head of Zeus. (Or at least that platform was briefly mentioned in his post; Doctorow doesn’t explicitly say how his brainstorm would work.)

When I first read this I first thought about taking Cory to task for his anti-Amazon FUD (he blames Amazon for only selling ebooks where suppliers tell it to).

I also thought about pointing out direct sales have never lived up to the hype.

While it is easy to buy ebooks in the Kindle Store, it’s difficult to find much less buy ebooks in niche 3rd-party ebookstores (hence why Harry Potter ebooks are available everywhere, why Baen Books moved into the Kindle Store – not away, and why Hachette never launched its Kindle Store competitor).

But I am not going to make that point because this effort might have enough publicity to succeed. (Plus I want authors to sell direct because they get more money.)

Instead, I want to point out Doctorow’s blind spot: the unwarranted assumption that authors need or even should be doing business with publishers.

The thing about Cory Doctorow is that he was an ebook pioneer. Ten years ago he was advocating that ebooks should be released DRM-free and under a Creative Commons license so that all could gain access (this mattered more in the pre-Kindle era when it was difficult to buy ebooks even in the US). He even went so far as to forbid his publisher from selling the ebook.

But like many pioneers, Doctorow advanced only so far. He never managed to shed his original assumptions and keep up with the times.

For example, Doctorow still thinks authors should do business with publishers.

It’s 2017, and publishers now expect authors to do their own marketing, blog regularly, be active on social media, and ideally already have their audience built before the contract is signed.

And now Doctorow wants authors to also

• Sell ebooks for publishers,
• And handle payments,
• And remit the money to publishers in several countries?

Okay, but if authors are going to do all this work then why sign with a publisher in the first place?

It’s 2017, and authors can control their work completely, they can hire the help they need, and they can cut out middlemen by dealing directly with retailers like Amazon.

Who would they give up control, and a lot of money, just to act as a salesperson for a publisher?

image by Joi

Remember how the Kindle Unlimited funding pool dipped in February in 2015 and 2016?

It happened again.

The KU funding pool dropped to $16.8 million in February 2017, a decrease of a million dollars from January. At the same time, the per-page rate increased slightly, to just under half a cent per page (0.49741 cents, to be precise).

• US: $0.0050 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0034 (EUR)
• UK: £0.0037 (GBP)
• France, Spain, Italy: €0.0049 (EUR)
• Netherlands: €0.0045 (EUR)
• Brazil: R$ 0.01203 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5170 (JPY)
• Australia, India, Mexico, Canada: no data

P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million

Self Publisher Bibel, Amazon

image by investmentzen

Since 2013 Bexar County’s Bibliotech digital library has opened two local branches as well as kiosks in a hospital, bus terminal, and on local military bases.

San Antonio Express News reports that Bibliotech will soon open a third branch on the east side of  San Antonio:

Bexar County officials offered a sneak peek Monday of what will become BiblioTech’s third — and largest — digital library, scheduled to open in August at the new East Meadows housing development.

Spanning 4,200 square feet, the digital library at the corner of North Walters and Burnet Street will be equipped with 50 computers and will offer access to electronic books and magazines and other services, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said. Membership is free for Bexar County residents.

 The digital library’s arrival to the East Side marks another step in the neighborhood’s transformation, which has made big strides since the Wheatley Courts public housing project was demolished and the mixed-income East Meadows development was built in its place.

“You’ve heard me talk about that vision for San Antonio being a globally competitive city, where everyone has opportunity to connect to prosperity,” Mayor Ivy Taylor said Monday. “We can’t achieve that unless we close the digital divide.

The new library will have few if any paper books and will instead devote its space to a reading room, a community room, a children’s area, a maker’s lab, and two group study rooms.

You can see the first bookless branch in this explainer video:

Anti-piracy firm Digimarc has taken a stab at defining the scale of the ebook piracy issue. They hired Nielsen to conduct a consumer survey on piracy, and found:

E-book piracy currently costs U.S. publishers $315 million each year in lost sales, and the Nielsen survey revealed that people who illegally download e-books are largely ordinary consumers, students and working professionals who access e-books from a wide range of digital sources, including online auction sites and via email from friends. The study highlighted the fact that 70% of illegal downloaders have either graduated from college or have a graduate degree. The most common age-range of an e-book pirate is between 30- and 44-years-old with a yearly household income between $60,000 and $99,000.

"When it comes to book piracy, you can’t prevent what you can’t predict. This is the challenge for publishers as they grapple with preventing illegal piracy," said Devon Weston, director, market development, Digimarc Guardian. "Our new Nielsen data makes it clear these pirates don’t fit a typical criminal profile. They access digital content from a vast universe of web pages, social platforms and file sharing portals. Our aim is to break down the problem for publishers and help them develop an effective prevention strategy."

Digimarc has a financial incentive to convince you that piracy is bringing about the end of western civilization; they sell anti-piracy services.

So this data comes from a highly suspect source, but even so it is the most accurate piracy data I have seen. Where most piracy stats come from analysts' wild guesses, the figures mentioned above are based on a consumer survey.

Real people were polled about their media consumption habits. We don’t know what they were asked (and that is another reason to distrust the data) but or once we have real data on the issue.

And that data tells us that piracy isn’t much of a problem in the ebook realm.

That  $315 million may sound like a lot but going by AAP figures ebooks were a four billion dollar market last year.

No one knows the true size of the ebook market, but we do know that the AAP said that their members earned $579 million from ebooks in the first half of 2016. That $579 million represents six months of revenue for about 40% of the industry. We can roughly convert it to retail sales by doubling it, and then dividing by 40% and then 70% (the latter roughly represents the industry’s share of the retail price).

That $579 million represents six months of revenue for about 40% of the industry. We can roughly convert it to retail sales by doubling it, and then dividing by 40% and then 70% (the latter roughly represents the industry’s share of the retail price).

When I ran the numbers, I got a market estimate of $4.1 billion.

And so Digimarc’s best estimate is that piracy accounts for less than 10% of the market.

In other words, it is nothing to worry about.

image by pasukaru76

New data from Japan’s Research Laboratory of the Publishing Science shows that the Japanese publishing industry revenues dropped to 1.47 trillion yen (around US $ 12.8 billion) last year, down 3.4% compared to the previous year.

Book sales accounted for 737 billion yen of that total, and only declined 0.7%. Magazine sales in Japan accounted for much of the rest, and totalled 734 billion yen. PublishNews.com.br notes that this was the first time in 41 years that magazine sales in Japan fell short of book sales.

eBooks, on the other hand, were the bright spot in the market stats. Japan’s digital books market grew 13.2% in 2016, compared to 2015. eBook sales totalled of 25.8 billion yen.

The highlights of the Japanese market in 2016 included the ongoing shift from the paper manga to the electronic manga; the bankruptcy of Taiyo-Sya, which was the fifth largest distributor of books and magazines in the country; and the expansion of the digital magazine reading market.

image by Guwashi999

A new digital writing device called the NoteSlate is scheduled for release soon, carrying a retail price of $99. Although it utilizes electronic paper technology, this gadget is not intended to function as a traditional e-reader. Instead, it is designed specifically as a digital sketchpad and note-taking tool.

The NoteSlate features a 13-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 750×1080. In terms of aesthetics and functionality, the company plans to launch four hardware versions that utilize different ink colors—black, green, blue, or red—alongside a separate model capable of displaying four colors at once. At its core, the device offers a minimalist user experience focused on creating, storing, and erasing drawings or handwritten notes. However, the manufacturers have indicated that a future firmware update will expand its capabilities to include PDF support compatible with Adobe DE DRM.

Weighing just 240 grams, the tablet is expected to offer an impressive battery life lasting several weeks on a single charge. While the developer of the specific epaper technology remains unconfirmed, industry speculation suggests Kent Displays may be the source. This is due to the fact that the NoteSlate’s screen dimensions and resolution are unique in the current market, and its industrial design shares similarities with the Boogie Board, another writing-focused device from Kent Displays.

The device has generated significant interest for its budget-friendly price point, though it has also faced criticism from users who would prefer support for external keyboards and text entry over purely handwritten input. While the initial announcement created a localized media buzz, subsequent reports have noted delays in the product’s development and availability. Regardless, the NoteSlate represents an attempt to find a niche for large-format electronic paper beyond the standard ebook market.

Earlier this week ZDNet and other sites reported that Brazil’s supreme court had reduced or eliminated taxes and import duties on ereaders and ebooks, but I think they are missing the story.

From ZDNet:

E-books are set to become more affordable in Brazil as the Supreme Court has ruled that they will now enjoy the same tax immunity as the pronto counterparts.

The debate on whether e-books should have the same tax treatment as print has been going on since September 2016 and the final ruling on the matter is that print and e-books are indistinguishable from each other.

In addition, reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle will also be tax-immune. However, the ruling stressed that this immunity is not extended to multifunctional devices that may support book reading software such as tablets, smartphones and laptops.

It is expected that in the next few months prices will be lowered across the purveyors of digital content operating in Brazil

According to Wikipedia, Brazil’s standard VAT rate is 42%, while books are tax exempt. This means that Brazilian ebook prices could drop by half in the near future.

And just as importantly, so could the price of ereaders.

Brazil has magnificent import duties which sometimes exceed the price of the imported product by a factor of two. The duties are not reflected in the price of the Kindle, which sells in Brazil for about 30% more than the US price, but 3rd-party ereaders imported by Brazilians can easily cost twice the list price.

Now much of the import duties have been removed (but not all – some Brazilian states impose their own sales taxes).

And that means ereaders are going to get a lot cheaper in Brazil – and Brazilians are probably going to see ereader prices drop a lot faster than ebooks.

After all, how do you know that publishers won’t just keep ebook prices high so they can pocket the difference?

Publish News Brazil

image by Rodnei Reis

eBooks make up a significant share of trade book sales in the US, UK, and other English-speaking countries but things are quite different in Spain.

Dosdoce's Javier Celaya revealed at a PubMagNet meeting last month that ebooks are expected to reach a double-digit share of Spain’s book market in 2016. The final data won’t be available until June, but Celaya said that ebook sales should reach 10%, up from around 6% of Spain’s book sales in 2015.

The Spanish book market as a whole is expected to grow by 3 to 3.5% in 2016, compared to 2.8% growth in 2015. Basically, the market is only growing as a result of digital sales,

Basically, the market is only growing as a result of digital sales, and only because publishers started getting sensible about their digital opportunities.

Celaya also pointed out a peculiarity of Spain’s digital book market: many Spanish publishers have reported that more than 60% of their digital sales are made internationally. Half of those international sales are coming from Latin America, with the US market and Europe accounting for 20% and 10%, respectively.

Spanish publishers are discovering what anyone in a niche national market should know; thanks to ebooks, one doesn’t have to be limited to the local. This is just as true in Spain as it is in South Africa.

Publish News Brazil

images by Genlab Frank,  Contando Estrelas

Eleven-month-old audiobook service Libro.fm launched an Audible-style subscription service last week.

This startup has been selling DRM-free audiobooks since last April, and now customers in the US and Canada can sign up for a monthly $15 subscription and buy one audiobook each month.

"The Libro.fm membership now gives audiobook listeners the opportunity to support their local bookstore every month and discover great audiobooks hand picked by expert indie booksellers," said Mark Pearson, CEO of Libro.fm, in a statement. "Most of us spend hours each day commuting and doing tasks where we could be listening to a book. Audiobooks are a great companion for escaping traffic, rocking your workout, or making the time pass while weeding, which is now one of my favorite activities."

Libro.fm has a catalog of more than 70,000 titles. You can listen to the audiobooks in its iOS or Android apps, and since the audiobooks are DRM-free you can also load them onto your preferred device and listen to them there.

For the past 18 months I have been arguing that  Kindle Unlimited was one of the major ebook channels in its own right just based on what it was paying publishers and authors each month.

New data from the latest Author Earnings Report shows that Kindle Unlimited accounts for a larger share of the US and UK ebook markets than even iBooks.

Correction: Data Guy sent me an email, pointing out that my title is wrong. What he found was that KU earnings, when combined with the retail sales of all the titles in KU, accounted for a greater number of unit sales (which, in my opinion, is a pretty confusing way to measure KU activity).

The main focus of the report is the relative size of each of the five major English-language ebook markets, but a later section delves into Kindle Unlimited’s share of the market.

Indie authors often struggle with the choice of whether to make a particular title a Kindle Unlimited-enrolled Amazon-exclusive or to sell it at all retailers. For those authors, the breakdown of indie sales on the left side of the above chart is a particularly interesting one. But it’s worth keeping in mind that around half of the “KDP Select” indie sales are actually full-read-equivalent Kindle Unlimited payments to indies, rather than straight retail purchases.

So let’s now break those KU full-read equivalents out separately, as shown as yellow pie-wedges in the two charts below:

So what do the above graphs tell us about Kindle Unlimited and indie author earnings?

The breakdown of indie dollar author earnings looks nearly identical to the unit-sales splits shown above. Kindle Unlimited indie page reads (at a current run rate of $180M+/yr) are now paying Amazon-exclusive indie authors far more total dollars than “wide” indie authors are earning from their sales at all non-Amazon ebook retailers combined (a total run rate of roughly $50M/yr in non-Amazon indie author earnings).

So should publishers and authors go all in on Kindle Unlimited?

Maybe, but to be honest I would not make a business decision like that based on the above data.

I am not disputing the validity of the data; my point is that individual authors are so small and the market so large that (with the right marketing) you can make a lot of money with either option.

Hell, there are authors making a living on direct sales or from other channels that don’t show up in the broader market data.

So while Kindle Unlimited’s market share matters on a broader scale, it is less important to individual authors and publishers.