The Revolution Will Be Read.
How many of you read ebooks? Please raise your hand. Someone
nudge Jimmy. I think he's asleep. Okay, that's better.
As I thought, just about everyone reading this blog has read
some form of digital book, whether ePub
or PDF. It's the future. That's not to say that paper books will disappear. In
fact, I'm not smart enough to say what exactly will happen to paper books. I
hope we have them for a long time to come. I am, however, smart enough to read
the writing on the book publishing wall. And the writing isn't in ink, but
rather pixels.
Mark Coker, who owns the ebooks distributor, Smashwords,
believes that ebook sales will be 45% of the
Yet evaluating sales isn’t an apple-to-apple comparison.
Let’s take Dan Brown’s latest book, Inferno.
Its list price is 29.99, add the cheapest shipping Amazon offers at $3.99, and
the total for your copy of Inferno is
$33.98. On the other hand, the Kindle edition is $12.99, or one-third the cost,
more or less. That means although ebooks are grossing 45% of what paper books
do, they are in fact outselling them book for book.
As a reader, I don’t have a pony in that race. I buy
whichever is cheaper. Sometimes I arrive late to an author’s party, and snap up
a used paperback for 99 cents—much cheaper than a $7.99 ebook (a semi-standard
epub pricing). Other times, I want something that just hit the shelves, and buy
the cheaper ebook. Yet again, there are moments that I want to read something
right now, and download it price be damned.
As an author, however, I’m squarely in the ebook camp. It
gives the publishing power to the writer. We still need editors, no question,
but what we don’t need are expensive offset printing presses, and high cost,
low yield marketing firms. Publishing ebooks allows writers, good and bad, to
publish what they write, and let the readers decide what is good.
Okay Jimmy, you can go back to sleep.
Comments
But there is something even more important about the ebook revolution -- how do we find new books to buy? I haven't walked into a Barnes & Noble in months. I don't remember the last time I visited an independent bookseller (are there any left?) But I fire up the Kindle app several times daily, and there are the recommendations. Whether researching a topic or hunting for a specific title, Amazon is most likely to have it, so that's my first stop.
If you want to reach the mass market, I think that's where it is today.
Norm, I hear ya, but I think my purchases are still equally divided.