> There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones
> However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.
Combining those, you claim that less than 4,000 movies are shot each year, “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones”.
I can’t see how that can be true. Google tells me there are about 2 million weddings in the USA each year. From that, I think it’s a very, very safe bet that over 10,000 wedding videos are shot in the USA each year, with the real number probably over a million.
Add in corporate videos, wedding anniversaries, videos about sports teams winning championships, high-quality tube channels, etc, and I expect the total number to easily be over 4 million.
And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”
I think they do in the context of “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones” and comparing them to a market that includes self-published books.
IMO self-published books would be better compared to self-published movies (which isn’t what the original commenter said, but they were just too obviously wrong).
So this would include things like YouTube videos, Twitch, etc, but not a private wedding video that doesn’t get published.
> And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”
When I talk about “material shot by amateurs with their phones” I was referring to independent very low budget movies, the modern version of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, not videos shot by people at parties, they do not classify as movies IMO.
Should we also include in the book category people's personal diaries, internal companies documents, sportsbooks, wedding picture books, school yearbooks, etc.?
Yes but what's your point? The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger. The video game market is much larger than both combined.
Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products (movies, games) pay off despite the initial expense.
> The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger
Only for a handful of titles though.
Most movies lose money, they sell very little if not nothing at all.
Most books don't sell as well, but it costed a very tiny fraction of the cost of a movie production to publish them.
It's mostly a single person in their homes in their spare time.
> Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products pay off despite the initial expense
The initial point was that most can't afford the more complicated products, but can still produce useful low tech manuals. It's doubtful that the high tech version of the manual would drive more sales, because the product in this case is not the manual, but the furniture (or whatever else).
The AR/VR manual could cost more than the actual product to make.
The politics of this are interesting. 3D movie and game content restores some of the exclusivity lost by amateur/phone content.
I'm not convinced that's a good bet. YouTube and especially TikTok exploded by going in the opposite direction.
But it's a move that could integrate Apple's movie and audio software, high end hardware (Studio and Pro), content studio ambitions, and now Vision Pro as a consumption device.
There's a lot more money in lowering the cost of entry to a new ecosystem than raising it. That's how the App Store exploded and drove iPhone sales, and how Amazon has a unicorn business just from self-publishing.
Going for the high end can work too, as long as the content and product are good enough. But it's a much tougher challenge.
if book publishers spent the same amount of money movie publishers spend on marketing a single blockbuster movie (50% of the budget, i.e. billions of dollars) books would sell a lot more too.
Don't be fooled by the raw numbers, look at the big picture.
Anyway that's not a fair comparison, you don't need special hardware to read books, you already have it installed by the OEM, they are called eyes.
But in all fairness books help to sell a lot of devices too
By 2018 Amazon reported selling close to 90 million e-readers. By 2022 the number of Kindle devices sold globally was over 150 million. By 2027, Statista projects the number of e-reader users to grow to 1.2 billion
The problem is e-readers are very reliable, so people don't buy them new every 6 months.
Which is also why people buy books, they are very reliable and last for centuries, without consuming a single drop of energy.
Books are sold in the millions per week and e-books in the hundreds of thousands.
There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones.
Figures range from 500,000 to one million books published annually.
However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.