figgles wrote:I read the (French!) book "My tailor is still rich", which talks a lot about Assimil's history as a company. They are not a big company, and the author cites sales numbers directly provided by Assimil. For me, this give me reason to buy directly from them, but I think they also help provide some much needed context to why books disappear. I do not believe they are actively "phasing out" books as a method on the whole, but they are certainly responding to market pressures.
There are a few things I want to point out here:
1. The numbers you cited still constitute a profit, even for those much less popular languages. Enough profit to build a huge business just on
Le catalan sans peine? Of course not, but they are not trying to build a business on that single, niche course.
It is "subsidized" by their many more popular courses, to an extent, but within that established infrastructure, these smaller courses would still turn a profit, just not enough to get rich on.
2. As has been pointed out, they still offer many of the same courses in languages other than English. Do we have numbers saying that Brazilian Portuguese actually sells more copies in Italian than English?
Considering how many more English speakers there are in the world, I find that rather hard to believe.
3. The reason that I specifically mentioned Russian and Brazilian Portuguese is that these are still two pretty "major" languages that are among the most popular 10 or so learned by English speakers. There's a big difference between phasing out Breton and phasing out Russian.
One of the main draws of Assimil in the first place is that they offer (quality) courses in a wide variety of languages. So, the irony of phasing out all but the few most popular languages is that this actually makes them
less relevant overall, since English speakers already have 100 courses to choose from for Spanish, French, and German.
This is also the effect of going from the serious course with well-constructed physical books to "just another app".
As someone who makes a living in online content and marketing, people who know what they're talking about know how important a "niche" is. Depending on your niche, it may not make you a super bazillionaire, but it is still enough to make a healthy living.
Trying to increase profits by abandoning your niche is a fool's game; it doesn't work in other industries and it hasn't worked in the language learning market. For instance, Living Language went from making solid courses in a wide variety of languages to irrelevant to out of business with this approach.