Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Betting on e-Books

Betting on e-books - Crain's New York Business: "Believing that e-books and print-on-demand technology have reached a tipping point with the public, Messrs. Oakes and Robinson will launch OR Books this fall as a Web-only house selling straight to consumers. The plan is to operate at a drastically reduced cost—blowing up a model whose inefficiencies have helped make this past year so painful for publishers large and small. The Association of American Publishers reports that revenues from adult hardcovers fell 16% through April, while revenues from adult trade paperbacks plunged 26%, compared with the same period a year ago.

Some specialty publishers have built businesses around e-books, but OR would be the first general-interest press to try the model. The partners are betting that the new-media opportunities that all book people are rushing to exploit will let a startup thrive even in a dismal retail environment."

Link via boinboing.

9 comments:

Rick Robinson said...

For all the analysis, they never seem to mention that the core problem is that Americans - and much of the rest of the world - simply DON'T READ BOOKS any more.

Frank Loose said...

I'm wondering if these efforts will be aimed at a particular genre and/or age demographic. I will resist the electronic book until they pry the last paperback book from my dead .... oh, no, that's something else. I am resistant to electronic readers because i love the feel of a paper book, flipping the pages, and all that goes with it, the covers, etc. I would speculate that younger folks would be more willing to embrace this technology. Older readers like myself who are stuck in their ways will come along as the industry forces us. Just wondering ....

beb said...

Business plans like this always seem to forget that one of the chief pleasures of wandering a bookstore is discovering an author you had never heard about before. Publishers who only sell or advertise on the web are limiting sales to people who have heard of their site. With millions of websites that's not going to be very many people.

Another way to "improve" the profitability of publishers is to do what Comic Book publishers have done -- make all sells to retailers final. Of course that drove comics out of drugstores, gorcery markets and bookstores into specialty shops, which failed in droves.

Mike said...

I'm in my late 60s, and have been reading books since I was 8 years old or so. I like ebooks, I've been reading them for almost a year now. No more having to wear a dust mask when I read my older books to keep from sneezing or having breathing problems, no more having peer at the small type (since you can enlarge it), etc. I already have 20% of my house that is not usable due to storage of books. I could get all that space back if I went to ebooks. I'm saying I don’t buy any printed books, I save that for special items. My casual reading (which is most of it) is all ebooks these days. It took about two days to get used to the ebook reader, and now I get just as lost in the process as with a printed book.

I have no problem browsing a place like Amazon to find new books/authors to read. In some ways it's easier, because of the greater selection.

Frank Loose said...

Mike ... you make some excellent selling points. Saving shelf space is a real plus. Last year i had to go through all my books, choose which ones to keep, which ones to give away, in order to free up space for the new ones i would be buying. I like the idea of controlling font size. With some books, the words are just too small, and i won't buy them. Still, I am hesitant to dive in. Maybe when the cost of the reader drops some more. It eventually will.

Mike said...

Frank, the Kindles have dropped in price recently. Even at the old price, I calculated the break-even point at something like 18 months, based on my monthly average book purchasing. Ebooks are less expensive than printed ones so you can end up saving money overall.

Anonymous said...

Being in buggy whip sales I abhor the idea of virtual buggy whips. You have to have the heft of a well crafted buggy whip in your hand to get the true experience of trhe buggy whip..
Bryan Barrett
B(ook)uggywhip Seller.

Mike said...

I deeply sympathise with the book sellers and used-book sellers (and I know a few). I've haunted book stores for most of my life (and still do).

But when it comes down to it, I'm less interested in the buggy whips than in getting from point A to point B.

Cheer up. It may still turn out that the quality printed copies will last longer than the electronic ones.

Anonymous said...

If the past is prolog the reader devices will fail long before the method of storage. 8 track, Beta anyone?
Bryan Barrett