Finding the Balance: Books
Over the past decade, the book publishing industry has been rather sharply taken over by the Internet. With the development of the Kindle, the Nook, and tablet computers the actual paper books have been on the decline. The electronic book, or eBook, rage has sparked the creation of eBook only publishing companies that see it as more cost effective to do away with their bulky, weightier counterparts. With the creation of the Kindle, Amazon saw the sale of eBooks increase almost exponentially. However, despite the dramatic surge and simplicity of buying books over the internet and downloading them to a hard drive, paper copies of books, whether hard cover or paperback, have still held a large, 87.1%, stake in book sales and some publishing firms still only produce physical books.
| Publisher B eBooks | Publisher B Both | Publisher B Physical | |
| Publisher A eBooks |
1, 1 |
2 or 3, 4 |
3, 3 |
| Publisher A Physical |
3, 3 |
2 or 3, 4 |
2,2 |
Even with Amazon covering the largest portion of eBook sales, there still is a niche, a strategy to publish both eBooks and physical books. As demonstrated in the graph at above, the payoffs, which are only guesses based on market share and intuition, show that two Nash equilibriums are present and are highlighted in the table with gray and blue lettering (Publisher A eBooks and Physical:Publisher B Both). Despite some publishing companies making moves into the eBook realm (~15% of revenue) to counteract decreasing physical book sales. There really isn’t a company that has made producing both eBooks and physical books the core of its business model; enter Brightline and Atavist. These two companies have created a joint venture to publish both types of books in an effort to achieve the fore mentioned Nash equilibriums. Since they are both relatively new, the combination of these two companies opens them to a great many opportunities as they will not be restricted by “legacy costs” and traditions. Thus, in this table Publisher A is any and every publishing company in the world and Publisher B is the Atavist-Brightline venture. If this table proves to be anything close to real life, they just may have hit upon something very profitable.
Sources-
http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4e83885b69bedde86500002d/kindle-sales.jpg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/02/rise-ebook-sales-decline-print-titles
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/12/ebook-only-publishers-cro_n_355686.html
Carr, David. “Media Chiefs Form Venture To E-Publish.” The New York Times. September 19, 2012, National Edition, B: 1, 6.