The Undead
E-Book
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (JUNE 2002)
Ebooks
are: (a) dead (b) undead (c) other. If you answered
“all of the above,” you are more correct than you know.
As spring turns to summer, not just the trees but oddly
enough ebooks — through whose black heart the New
York Times drove a stake last fall — are sprouting.
Palm,
which has stolen right past the ever-stumbling Microsoft
and Adobe
to become the single largest source of ebook downloads,
is experiencing double digit growth and is selling some
1,000 downloads per month. As a Palm spokesman happily
put it: “Our sales are going crazy.”
Sales of ebooks going crazy? You betcha. Several shifts
are transforming e-publishing: the e-reader quality
is improving, the number of download sites is expanding,
the amount of material available is growing and, as
the song goes, time is on our side.
We all remember the first time we saw a RocketeBook.
And while far from a great success, after radical price
cuts and smart merchandising, the new Gemstar
incarnations
have a following. However, the new generation of Pocket
PCs and Palm Pilots,
with their reflective light screens, 65,000 colors,
and multiple functionality are what have really kick-started
the marketplace. What makes Palm/PPC so valuable is
that they are easy to carry and do a lot of useful things
— including displaying Tolstoy or the latest
Mary Higgins Clark, and can play MP3 audio books.
Unlike the US, in Europe, there are already multi-function
ebook readers, some of which not only have very comfortable
150 dpi screens (twice as crisp as a laptop) and up
to six hours of battery life, but also allow you to
surf the Net, send and receive email, do word processing,
play your MP3 files, and record conversations. Not surprisingly,
coming to America this fall is the tablet PC that looks
remarkably like these European e-readers. And right
behind that is eInk,
a totally flexible screen that looks and acts a lot
like, well, paper.
But a killer reader is only one piece of the puzzle.
Distribution is crucial, and to that end, the Cleveland-based
company OverDrive
is releasing a Digital Kiosk that for a few thousand
dollars will allow any website to become an e-book vendor.
CEO Steve Potash stated, “If last year we created
50 points of sale online, next year we want to create
50 every month, globally.” Eventually they hope to be
like physical newsstands in downtown Manhattan, one
on every corner.
On the content front, S&S’s Keith Titan
noted that the August release of all the Hemingway
novels is just part of a program in which both front
and backlist books are also released
as ebooks. Concerning the ever-contentious matter
of royalties, agent Brian De Fiore put it well
when he said that the industry standard is for publishers
to expect ebook rights as part of the original contract,
“although they are willing to revisit the royalty situation
every couple of years.” And, as they say, time heals
all wounds, even the self-inflicted, such as the unwieldy
expectations created by the original ebook hype. Time
will allow markets to develop, products to improve,
and even ebooks to find their way.
This
article was contributed by James
Lichtenberg.
©2002
Publishing Trends
