We devote acres of blogspace to e-books but do we really know what we’re talking about? A three-installment Book Industry Study Group survey will help us at last to speak knowledgeably.

In the first installment, the majority of the 556 who responded to the survey gave affordability as the principal reason for buying an e-book vs. the same book in print format. They also held shareability as an important factor. Searchability and environmental friendliness were secondary in their value system. They (especially males) were not big fans of e-books with Digital Rights Management (DRM), restrictive controls over content and devices. Yet their second favorite device for reading an e-book, after computers, was the Kindle, a closed DRM system.

One of the most intriguing findings is that “30% of print book buyers would wait up to three months to purchase the e-book edition of a book by their favorite author.” Though this contingent does not constitute a majority, it is substantial enough to reinforce the recently instituted policies by some publishers of holding back “e-prints” of their hardcover books in order to give the print editions some room to find their audience, maximize sales and have a shot at going on the bestseller list. At this point in time e-book sales do not count with those who make up key bestseller lists such as the New York Times‘s and Publishers Weekly‘s.

For more information and details of how the survey was conducted, click here.

Two more installments to come.

Richard Curtis

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is an aphorism ascribed to Benjamin Disraeli, but also to Mark Twain, who never let a good aphorism go unclaimed. Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Marketplace and blogger-in-chief of its Publishers Lunch book biz e-blast, has updated the saying to include the Book Industry Study Group’s analysis of last year’s publishing industry sales. His report is pretty disturbing, since, like most of my colleagues, we rely on what BISG tells us. What’s worse, we disseminate it to you, which kind of makes us damned liars once removed.

We’ll grant that BISG’s hardworking staff are not calculating (pun intended, and a rather good one at that) prevaricators. But they may fairly be suspected of doing some guessing. Whether their guesses are educated, we’ll leave it to you to judge after you check out Cader’s assertions.

But first a word about the Book Industry Study Group. Its website declares that it is “the U.S. book industry’s leading trade association for research and supply chain standards and policies.

“Our member-driven organization uniquely represents all segments of our industry from publishers to booksellers, paper manufacturers, libraries, authors, printers, and wholesalers, as well as organizations concerned with the book industry as a whole. For 30 years, BISG has provided a forum for industry professionals to come together and efficiently address issues and concerns to improve and advance the book community.”

One of BISG’s problems is that industry professionals are not necessarily cooperative with surveys. Its efforts to cull data from small presses (under $50 million in sales) were about as effective as a census of tribes in the Brazilian Rain Forest. Writes Cader,

“Only about 500 companies responded, of 70,000 queried by e-mail. Another 50,000 so-called publishers registered with Bowker don’t even have e-mail addresses listed. But through the magic of multiplication (and fancy statistical methods to align and “triangulate” the new information versus the previous, also unproven, numbers) a fraction of real information turns into billions of dollars of revenue.“

Even when publishers and bookseller do cooperate, the input is far from reliable.

In recent weeks, we’ve looked a little bit at the confusingly broad distinctions in the Bowker counts of new titles published last year and tried to reckon with Amazon’s unsubstantiated glimpse into rising Kindle sales. Discerning readers already know that on a standing basis, we [Publishers Lunch] very consciously do not report periodic numbers from the AAP, Census Bureau, and IDPF since they are so incomplete (and sometimes inconsistent) as to be more confusing than illuminating. Nielsen Bookscan is great for what it covers, but is also incomplete (and doesn’t capture certain things, like ebook sales, at all), and Bowker’s PubTrack is interesting at reflecting very specific buying patterns and demographics but is no substitute for actual market data.

Though Cader himself joined a BISG advisory group to see if he could be of help, he came away far from satisfied with the organization’s methodology or conclusions. “While I applaud many of the new goals, I was – and remain ever more – a skeptic on multiple points.” He casts serious doubt on BISG’s contention that small presses generated some $13 billion in revenue last year. That $13 billion leeway would seem to account for the difference between the total sales of $40.32 billion reported by Book Industry TRENDS for 2008 and the American Association of Publishers estimate of $24.255 billion for the same period.

Oh dear – $13 billion. If you relied on BISG number crunching to calibrate a voyage to Mars, the space ship might touch down anywhere between Jupiter and Uzbekistan.

Poor market research has many fathers, and BISG is by no means alone in its quest for truth in reporting. Exaggerated printing and sales figures issued by publishers are so endemic that savvy agents discount them by as much as 50%. And even e-book stats are not completely dependable, because the information-gathering is far from thorough. But at least the AAP and International Digital Publishing Forum come out and say so in their monthly releases.

Cader’s forthright views are to be commended, but we’re somewhat shook up and urge you to take any numbers disseminated by publishing industry information gatherers with a wholesome grain of salt.

For some specific breakdowns by category, you can read Cader’s analysis in full.

Richard Curtis