ebook sales

 This report, in the Southern Review of Books, gives information and forecasts on the topic.    There is also comment on Silk's Vault in the review:

http://www.anvilpub.net/southern_review_of_books.htm

17. Ebooks gaining in popularity with youthful iPod and iPhone market

Much of the early market for ebooks in the U.S. consisted of romances and badly written soft porn, leading to the rise of a number of publishers that specialized in the genre - Triskelion, Amber Quill, Aphrodite's Apples and Silk's Vault, to name a few. Many early entries into this field have disappeared, are in bankruptcy or struggling.

But now, leading publishing houses are beginning to place more emphasis on printing their books electronically, an indication of the growing popularity of ebooks, which currently account for more than $50 million in annual U.S. book sales. True, the market share of ebooks is only about one-half of one percent of the overall book publishing market, but revenues are growing at double digit rates, which is not true of the conventional book market.

A number of specialty ebook stores have sprung up online to cater to growing demand. 

HarperCollins recently launched into the digital revolution with a service that allows people to download the first 10 pages of the first two chapters of forthcoming books into Apple iPhones. 

Recent research finds that more than half of Internet users would like to read books, magazines or newspapers in digital format.  But the vast majority said they would prefer to read it on their laptops rather than a device specially designed for ebooks. 

Jeff Gomez, the senior director for online consumer sales and marketing for the Penguin Group in the U.S., said that publishers have to embrace electronic books if they wanted to survive in the 21st century. "Offering electronic editions for free won't cannibalize the sale of print copies, but will instead give potential consumers an appetite for a book they might have not heard of before," he said.

"Far from causing the book industry's downfall, free access to electronic versions of novels has the potential to be its savior. And to publishers, struggling for relevance in a digital age, that should be music to their ears." 

The adoption of an ebook standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum, creating a unified file format for ereaders, will likely help to popularize ebooks by saving publishers the trouble of having to choose from one (or, more frequently, several) of the many formats out there. 

In September, the standards group introduced the Open Publication Structure 2.0 and its .epub file format. The standard isn't worth much if you can't get enough heavyweights behind it, but Hachette, publishers of Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!), the Onion's Our Dumb World and James Patterson books, was the first to announce that they're adopting the .epub format. That gives the new standard some street cred, No, it's up to some hardware vendors to get behind it. 



Joseph Harris


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



------------------------------------------------------
Post a message:   ebook-community [[at]] *
Unsubscribe:      ebook-community-unsubscribe [[at]] *
Switch to digest: ebook-community-digest [[at]] *
Switch to normal: ebook-community-normal [[at]] *
Put mail on hold: ebook-community-nomail [[at]] *
Administrator:    ebook-community-owner [[at]] *

(* == yahoogroups.com)
------------------------------------------------------- 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-community/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-community/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    mailto:[email protected] 
    mailto:ebook-community-fullfeatured-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@public.gmane.org

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    ebook-community-unsubscribe-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@public.gmane.org

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/