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.
