Thrilling Ebook
Sales? Mirabile Dictu
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (AUGUST 2003)
Like
most publishers’ ebook expectations in this deflated
era of digital publishing, Seven Stories Press
had fairly unspectacular ones. They dutifully digitized
their files. They hung out their e-shingle. They even
wrangled a way to sell ebooks directly from their site.
And the results trickled in. “Tiny” is the word one
executive used. Even Noam Chomsky’s 9-11,
which spent seven weeks on the New York Times extended
bestseller list and has 300,000 copies in print, racked
up only “a few hundred” ebook sales. Then, with the
aid of Paris-based content management partner GiantChair,
they converted some ebooks to the Palm Reader format,
selling them on the Palm Digital Media site. And a lightbulb
popped on. “As soon as we started putting books that
had not been in Palm format on their site, we started
seeing two digits added to our checks,” says Cory
McCloud, GiantChair’s CEO. It was a “rather thrilling
surge of ebook sales,” confirms Lars Reilly,
Systems Manager at Seven Stories. “Palm Digital Media
does a tremendous amount of business and we’re starting
to see our type of titles included in that.”
Ebooks may still represent a drop in the bucket for
the publishing industry, but it’s hard not to gawk at
Seven Stories’ minor triumph. Ebooks? Thrilling? Just
ask Mike Segroves, Director of Business Development
for the Palm Digital Media Group, who says Palm currently
sells 1,000 books every day, a figure that’s growing
steadily. “If we continue the rest of the month at the
same pace we’re going,” he says, “we’ll have a 19% increase
over last month, and a 30% increase over July of last
year.” Segroves figures that about 60% of all ebooks
sold are in the Palm Reader format, which has a library
of 10,500 titles, with 100 new books added every week.
And readers tend to be rabid. A random sampling of three
customers from his sales log the other day, Segroves
says, turned up one who had purchased 178 books; one
who had purchased about 50; and one who was a first-time
buyer. “We’re very pleased with the rate our business
is growing,” he says, noting that the company recently
launched German and French editions of its ebooks, licensing
technology to Internet retailers in those countries
(pdassi.de in Germany; GiantChair in France).
Partners are now being sought for similar operations
in Italy, Spain, and Scandinavia, and Palm is also active
in the UK, since WH Smith offers Palm ebooks.
At very least, say admirers, Palm wins the cachet award.
“I like to see Palm as the iTunes of the ebook
industry,” McCloud says. “You’ve got all these other
bozos out there making life difficult. Adobe and
Microsoft are barking up these complicated DRM
trees that are just making the user run away from the
whole experience as fast as they can.” Microsoft, as
one might imagine, is conceding turf to nobody. “All
of our publishing partners are reporting substantial
growth in eBook sales — most of them double-digit growth
over the past year,” Group Product Manager of eReading
Cliff Guren said in a statement. To prod readers
over to its fold, last month Microsoft launched a 20-week
summer promotion of free downloads, offering up 60 fiction,
nonfiction, and reference ebooks. (The catch: only three
titles per week are available, and you can’t access
previously offered titles.)
Among other publishers, cautious optimism rules the
day. “The ebook market is a very, very small market,”
says Kate Tentler, Publisher of Simon &
Schuster Online. “But its growth is exponential.
From month to month it can be anywhere from 50% to 70%
growth over the previous year. We’re pleased with the
places we’re seeing certain traction in terms of ebooks”
— those being sci-fi, romance, and the big bestsellers.
S&S sells ebooks directly in the Adobe, Microsoft,
and Palm formats from its SimonSaysShop site, though
Tentler sees no major consumer preference among the
three formats. Her feeling is that further format winnowing
will ensue before consumers curl up with ebooks as they
do their iPods. Though Gemstar will be
missed, she says: “When there are so many formats available,
it dilutes the process for the consumer.”
Over at HarperCollins, executives are bullish about
the PerfectBound ebook imprint, which has published
more than 400 titles, with a record 300 expected this
year. “We’re very pleased with the progress of our PerfectBound
imprint, specifically the fact that it is publishing
and not just digitizing,” says David Steinberger,
President of Corporate Strategy and International for
HarperCollins. “It’s a focused list. We provide
editorial support and publicity support for many of
these titles. And we publish on a global English basis
in many cases.” Steinberger points out that the ebook
program is knitted into a number of other new Internet
strategies that are geared to the core mission of serving
authors. Those include the “extremely successful” AuthorTracker
service, which updates readers by email when their favorite
authors publish new titles or go on tour — “We have
over 3,000 authors and we have sign-ups for every one
of them,” Steinberger says — and the Invite the Author
service, in which authors are made available each month
to participate in reading group sessions via telephone
(newly invited authors include Anthony Bourdain and
Jonathan Safran Foer). About a dozen authors
have participated so far, according to Ardy Khazaei,
recently promoted to SVP Electronic Media. Harper has
also been syndicating content to more than a dozen non-book
sites such as those for Fox network affiliates,
which post Harper’s author interviews, chapter excerpts,
and other book features.
Moving
the P-Book Needle
That’s
just the sort of Internet strategy some feel can actually
move the sales needle — whether for ebooks or plain
old printed matter. “Everyone is selling the bookstores,”
says Carol Fitzgerald, President of The Book
Report Network. “You really need to sell the readers.”
Fitzgerald has been working with HarperCollins on
a teen project, where 20 advance reader copies are made
available in an “advertorial” on her teenreads.com site,
and distributed to teens who request them. (Those readers
are then invited to submit 50-word reviews of the title,
which are devoured by the HarperTempest editorial
team.) The program works, says Fitzgerald, because the
site reaches its precise target market. “We have 57,000
teen readers,” she says. “They’re not coming here for
makeup tips. They’re coming here to read.” Meanwhile,
next month Fitzgerald is set to launch FaithfulReader.com,
a site for Christian readers, and is currently seeking
sponsorship from Christian publishers. So does it all
pay off? “Our sales were up in the first quarter with
Amazon,” she says. “We were up double digits.
Our traffic was up so significantly, we had over half
a million unique visitors coming to our websites in
April alone. Publishing is in such rough shape right
now, if people were doing more with the Web, I think
they’d be faring much better.”
©2003
Publishing Trends
