'Bridget Jones' Goes 'Wild'
➕ An award-winning novel about slavery
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
With summer kicking in and people starting to be offline a bit more (you’re never going to miss The Optionist, of course, but other stuff), you may have missed this Business Insider story from late June about leaked data regarding Amazon’s book sales. And you shouldn’t. Compared to movie grosses, book sales have always been a bit of a black box. And Amazon’s numbers are the black box inside that black box. (Yes, BookScan reports retail sales, but those numbers are hard to get and don’t fully capture different formats like audio and eBooks.)
BI got its hands on a trove of internal Amazon documents that finally shed some light on the online retail giant’s book business. The top-line takeaway is that books are still a big category for Amazon, accounting for roughly $20B in worldwide sales in 2022. A little more than half of that — about $11B — came from the U.S. The gap between print ($8.8B) and eBooks ($2.4B) is huge. So are those numbers! That $8.8B print figure translates to approximately 800 million books. However, this is the number that stands out the most: Amazon controls 70 percent of the retail book market.
As BI notes, it’s hard to draw easy conclusions about what this means for the book market. Print sales rose nearly 9 percent in 2022. And after years of declining retail numbers, both Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers finally seem to be on the rebound (with B&N adding 50 stores and the number of indie outlets growing by 200). Still, there’s a lot that this data dump doesn’t tell us. For instance, are bestsellers bigger because of Amazon? Does Amazon’s deep catalog actually promote a broader range of sales?
We also don’t get a sense of how people actually discover books in the 2020s. In the old days, hand-sells and reviews were important influencers. But on Amazon there’s no virtual clerk saying, “Try this and let me tell you why.” Sure, there are sites like Goodreads, but I’m not convinced that they’re as effective as the good old face-to-face hand-sell.
You can read the entire article here.
The Eruption is over: The screen rights sale of the new Michael Crichton/James Patterson novel that we’ve been tracking (and here and here) for awhile now, has finally found a buyer in Sony. Deadline calls it a seven-figure deal (🤷🏻) and notes that Free Solo directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi are already attached. Keanu Reeves is reportedly in talks to star. We’ll see . . .
Onto this week’s picks, which include a classic novel from the ‘80s, a time-traveling sci-fi whodunit and a great true-crime grift. The rundown:
A rom-com about a woman who reacts to a breakup by buying a houseboat and traveling around England
A grounded sci-fi mystery about four friends who time-travel back to college to solve the still-unexplained death of a classmate
A road-trip comedy about a Lyft driver who’s offered a fortune to transport a mysterious box across country
A mystery-drama about a man investigating his father’s suicide and its relationship to a long-ago tragedy
A true-crime drama about a failed hedge funder who swindled his fellow Harvard Business School alumni out of millions
