Read the price of e-books from Readmoo's top 100 best sellers in 2021

After reading the book rankings for several years in a row, there are inspirations and bitterness; The sales charts and analysis, which, at the end of the year, traced a certain kind of reader's silhouette, were also gradually skewed over time. The new year is about to begin, as if entering a new dark labyrinth, and continue to work hard to find the figure of the reader.

However, in the past two years, the wave of "digital publishing" has exploded, among which e-books and new books have been published overwhelmingly. Many new books and publishers have moved to "simultaneous publishing of paper and electricity", and a large number of readers' reading habits have shifted from paper to electronic. When a new book comes out, their biggest concern is always: "Are there any e-books?" And I've been part of that readership this year. After trying the company's e-reader for more than a year, this year, I also officially purchased my own e-reader and put it into the arms of the e-book collection.

So this year, instead of reading the relatively traditional blogs and annual reports, let's take a look at the 2021 Readmoo Top 100 Bestsellers list .

In recent years, after the annual top 100 rankings of various online bookstores are announced, they will also submit annual reading reports, and the details are more and more detailed. Since most of the data is in the hands of the platform, there is limited data available from the public ranking data. Therefore, readers who are interested in the depiction of "e-book reader image" are recommended to directly view the "Readmoo 2021 Annual Reading Report" .

And I observe the ranking list every year, and I am always most interested in the issue of "book price".

How are eBooks priced?

The "real price" of e-books is often linked to paper books (unless they are E-only publications), and there was a brief discussion about the price of e-books last year. It was caused by a speech made by the senior publisher He Feipeng when he received the Special Contribution Award of the 44th Golden Tripod Award, on the issue of "the price of e-books is too high", which caused a discussion in the publishing industry. He Feipeng pointed out that "e-books should be reduced to 50% off the price of paper books" to be attractive to readers.

The discussion on this matter (Damn, I didn’t keep up with it at the beginning), based on this Facebook post by Yan Zeya, founder of Yayan Culture, this Facebook post by Zhu Yajun, editor-in-chief of Aquarius Culture, and the editor-in-chief A of Qianwei Publishing House. The Naruto Hall invitation is the most representative.

Editor-in-chief Zhu Yajun believes that it is more reasonable to use 40% off the price of paper books. "The profits of authors and publishers will not be compressed, and there is no need to be greedy to make more money"; while Yan Zeya directly opposes He Feipeng's claim As low as 50% off, it is believed that e-books will slow down the reprinting speed of paper books, increase the speed of out-of-print, decrease the number of prints, increase the unit cost, and have to increase the pricing. Isn’t the book going out of print?” All three articles pointed out that the point is not how high or low the price is, but how publishers can create content that appeals to a new generation of readers.

And what is the current price of e-books actually? I directly counted the data of Readmoo's annual top 100, and compared the pricing of paper books and e-books, and the average is "30% off" the price of paper books.

 Average eBook discount: 70%
Minimum discount: 89% ("Red-Eye Daily: Red-Eye Accident Investigation Company's Extra Story Part 1") *Romantic Highest Discount: 39% ("Blue Period (1)")*Cartoon

In fact , as many as 72 e-books on the list are priced at 30% off the price of paper books. Therefore, in practical terms, most publishers currently anchor the price of e-books at 30% off the price of paper books. But is there any possibility of further scheduling in this discount space? In the current situation of 29% off, 69% off when new books are published, and even in the case of momo shopping network's normal "64% off full amount", there are often cases where the price of paper books is lower than the price of e-books. In turn, e-books are also affected by the discount war. Publishers must also allow e-books to have discounts from time to time, so that e-book prices can be competitive if they drop further.

The Readmoo platform exposes the word count of the work and makes the publication show its original shape

This year, I have compiled the Readmoo rankings, and I am particularly concerned about the relationship between book price and content. In the era of paper books in the past, book pricing was closely related to the "number of pages", and various types of books often had a price range for how much per page. For a related discussion, please refer to the average per-page pricing rate in my last year 's "Reading Weather in this Pandemic Year in 2020: Watch Blogs and Eslite's Year-End Report ". And when we compare book prices, it is often based on this. The thicker the book, the more expensive it is.

It is precisely because of this that many paper books have the phenomenon of "expanding wind". Obviously there are not many words, but it is necessary to collect more than 300 pages, and there are many people who reduce the center of the page, increase the line spacing, and enlarge the font level; or choose thicker inner pages to make the book of more than 200 pages look like It is "as thick" as someone else's book of three or four hundred pages. Various kinds of "supporting book pages" also "supporting book prices" emerge in an endless stream.

Once these books are digitized, they are decoupled from paper and page counts, and the word counts are clearly disclosed, which also makes it worthwhile to rethink the method of book pricing.

I counted the price and word count of these 100 best-selling e-books. The average length of each book is about 150,000 words (the median book is 130,000 words); the average price of e-books is about 2 yuan per 1,000 words. .

However, we subdivided the 100 e-books and found that only 28 of them are Chinese books, and the remaining 72 are translated books .

Then I am curious, if you look at the average price per thousand words of Chinese books and translated books individually, is there any difference:

In terms of Chinese books vs. translated books among the 100 books, the average price of Chinese e-books per thousand words is 2.56 yuan; higher than the 1.9 yuan per thousand words of translated e-books.

Of course, these 100 best-selling books vary in size and word count, so I use the "average words per page" and "average price per thousand words" as indicators to comprehensively evaluate these 100 books.

Top 10 least average words per page:

Top 10 highest average price per thousand words:

In the top 10 of these two indicators, there are 8 duplicates: "Old-school girl shopping route", "You can be angry, but don't get angry", "Daily girl", "I graduated five years ago, with ETF Earns 4 Million", "High Sensitivity is a Talent", "I Want to See You Grow Old", "Fire Comes, Run Fast", "Gray Scale Thinking".

Among these 12 books, 9 are Chinese books , which is also consistent with the above-mentioned price of Chinese books being higher than that of translated books. And there are 6 books of the "inspirational growth" genre (3 other literary novels, 2 business finance books, and 1 social science book).

But can we just judge that these books are Sengfeng Books? Not really. First, these books are all bestsellers, and according to Readmoo reader scores, the average score of these 12 books is 4.5 , and there is a certain quality assurance; second, different types of books have different pricing logic and target readers, such as Practical business financial management books tend to have fewer words (multiple tables and charts), but if the information meets the needs of current readers, is concise, and has high gold content, a slightly higher price can be acceptable to consumers.

However, through the disclosed word count, paper book price, and e-book price, consumers can more transparently judge the solidity and length of a book's content. And through the big data calculation of the e-book platform, it should also be possible to obtain the average time for each reader to read a book. I think Readmoo can indeed expose this information directly on the product page, so that readers can evaluate how long it takes to read a book and whether the content is soft or hard.

The average price is 300 yuan, and some books can be read for several weeks; some books can be eaten in a few hours, which is also worthy of readers' evaluation.

Then look back:

Top 10 most average words per page:

The top ten with the lowest average price per thousand words:

On the other hand, there are only four repeated books: "Promised Land: A Memoir of Obama", "Chopsticks: Strange Stories", "13.67", "Poor Charlie's Common Sense (Additional Edition)" . Among the 16 books combined by the two indicators, as many as 14 are translation books , of which 6 are literary novels, 4 are business finance, 4 are social sciences, and 2 are natural science.

Taking literary novels as the bulk is also in line with our general impression that novels have a large number of characters and are relatively cheap.

What kind of thinking can such statistics lead us to?

Under the concept of breaking the page count of e-books, it is worth rethinking how to price "publication"; however, can "word count" become another standard for measuring price? Not really. Whether the final book is worth the price still depends on the quality of the content of the book.

However, at the moment when paper books and e-books are published simultaneously, the two are intertwined, especially as the editor-in-chief Yan Zeya said, the crowding out effect caused by e-books makes copyright books more likely to be unable to be reprinted, renewed and out of print. Case. E-books published alongside paper books are often used as icing on the cake. Everything is still based on the arrangement and design of paper books. Therefore, the price of e-books follows the price of paper books (there is a 30% discount). However, the price of paper books is determined according to the number of pages and printing costs, so the content of e-books is short and the price is high.

If it is a deliberate arrangement, then we can objectively judge whether its content is worth the corresponding price; but if it is in the planning stage of the paper book, the number of pages and the price are intentionally increased, then in the case of e-books Even more bloated.

However, if we look back at the book price of "2 yuan per thousand words on average", does it make people feel paradoxically low? Is content really so cheap?

Another advantage brought by e-books is that they can focus more on the "content" provided by the creators, putting aside the physical image and limitations. Aside from the noise of binding, arranging, printing, etc., just the text created by the author, the information organized, and the new knowledge put forward, is it lower than the paid lectures, and the online courses are worse?

On the contrary, it is precisely because of the mass-printed publications in the golden age of publishing in the past that “writings”, as specific “paper books”, were only regarded as some kind of industrialized products, and their value was reduced by mass copying. But is "intellectual property" right to be undervalued like this?

Now that the number of publications has collapsed, and the price of books has been rising due to the decline of printing volume, through e-books, we can break through the limitations of the form, and we can focus more on the essence of the content: its value does not depend on how expensive paper, How many beautiful cover designs and even how many copies are printed. Therefore, the price of e-books should not actually be linked to the price of paper books, nor should it be linked to the number of words. He may be used as a reference, but a more "modern" pricing method should be based on the content itself. From this perspective, the price of both e-books and paper books should rise again, and because "he deserves a higher value."