Re: "The Elusive E-book"

On May 8, 2008, at 4:41 PM, Aaron Walker wrote:

> Yes, we are caught between the old school and the new school.
>
> Old school sees publishing success as sitting on Oprah holding up  
> their book.
>
> New school success would have to be defined differently.
>
> Would things change is we had a run away "best seller" e-book  
> somewhere? Yes, it would.
>
> A book that captured so many people's attention that it sold 5,000  
> + copies the first two weeks. Not given away, but 5,000 people paid  
> for it.
>

If you want to make the rest of the book industry sit up and take  
notice, you're going to have to change that number by a large factor:  
not 5,000 copies in a week, but north of 100,000.

A big best seller in paper sells many MILLIONS of copies. A modest  
one sells several hundred thousand copies. Whichever way it goes, a  
very large chunk of those copies are sold (by the publisher) in the  
first couple of weeks. Of course, it takes the bookstores longer to  
sell them to the readers, but the industry looks at sales figures  
from the publishers' perspective.

The ebook segment is currently miniscule. A modest publishing house,  
like FSG was before Holtzbrink bought it, will sell more than the  
entire ebook industry.  BUT it's growing, and it has features that  
make it important to the future of small press publishing, as well as  
potentially a replacement for all paperback publishing, IMO.

Still, if that is to happen, only the sales of books will help.  
Giving books away may get more people interested in reading ebooks,  
but I think it increases the chance that ebooks never become  
significant.


Marion Gropen
Gropen Associates, Inc.
www.GropenAssoc.com
Offering Financial Advice By-The-Question,
Downloadable Profit-Enhancing Tools,
and Classes to the Small Press Community.




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