Digital Publishing: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas?

This is a guest post by Tony Viardo, the CEO of the publisher, Astor + Blue Editions. [Astor +Blue Editions has put its entire first season’s list of e-book titles on a holiday promotional sale for $0.99 or $1.99 until Jan. 7, 2013]

So how many articles have we read about E-books and Digital Publishing this year? For anyone who generally follows the book world (rabid booklover, book-blogger, industry pro or casual reader), we’re literally inundated with the amazing numbers—“E-book sales up 125% (again) over the 175% they were up from last year’s 225% increase!”—and equally amazing technological announcements—“Next Fall, the new ZimWittyZoomDitty tablet not only updates your Facebook and Goodreads friends whenever you snort in disgust … it cooks dinner for you at the same time!” 

This leads many to take at least casual stock of what’s going on/going to happen to the “Publishing World” as we know it. And if your friends are like my friends (hardcore print book consumers), that stock is usually pretty morbid (sharp Greenwich Village angst not included): “Print books are doomed, so are brick-and-mortar stores. Goodbye literary quality. Oh and some pajama-wearing techie living in a basement with a laptop is going to be the new Sulzburger; we’ll all have to bow down!” 

If you (or that good friend of yours) fall into the mortified category, my take (for what it’s worth) may come as positive news: E-books are not, and will not be, the Grinch Who Stole Christmas; in this case, the “Print World’s” bacon. Now, as the owner of a “Digital First” publishing house (Astor + Blue Editions, www.astorandblue.com) my opinions may easily be written off as self-serving and invalid. But bear with me for a minute… these are fact-based observations and I might just make sense (Someone tell my mom and dad). 

As someone who earns a living from publishing, I have to follow numbers and industry trends as closely as possible. And while some see doom and gloom for Print, I see exciting developments for both Print and E-book formats. What do the numbers show? Digital book revenue is skyrocketing, print revenue is declining. Natural conclusion? E-books are killing print books. But not so fast. Historically, Print revenue has always seemed to be declining (even before E-books were invented), but that doesn’t mean the book market is dying or shrinking. 

We have to remember that in fact the book market is growing. Readership always grows because population always grows. Every year, new readers enter the vast pool of the club that is “adult readership,” (despite Dancing with the Stars). And every year more readers are being born and theoretically being inspired by Ms. Crabtree’s elementary reading class. **So why the decline? Readership grows gradually, but the sheer number of books and book vendors grow exponentially, showing an investment loss almost every year. (Basic statistics: the widening universe makes it look like a shrinking pie when it isn’t). 

So what does this mean? If you look at the numbers (historically), revenue for print books may have declined, yes, but not more than “normal,” and not significantly more than it did when there were no E-books around. (This is arguable of course, but the long term numbers do not show a precipitous drop-off). The yearly revenue decline, if there is one, can just as easily be written off to economic conditions as to E-book competition. Bottom line: Any drop in print revenue that may be caused by E-books are not significantly sharp enough to declare that E-books are destroying print book sales. (Hence no Grinch). 

What may be happening, and what I believe is happening is that a whole new market for E-books is developing, while the print book market growth, like Publishing as a whole, is still growing at a historically gradual pace. (Boringly flat). Come up with your pet anecdote here, but I believe that more new readers are entering the market (who otherwise wouldn’t have) because of E-readers; existing readers are consuming more books (both print and e-book) than they did before; and while it would seem that a certain print title is losing a sale whenever readers buy it in E-book format, this is offset, at least somewhat, by the fact that more print titles are being bought (that otherwise wouldn’t) because of the extra marketing buzz and added awareness produced by the E-book’s cyber presence. All of it evens out in the end, and I believe, ultimately fosters growth industry-wide. 

So take heart Print fans, E-books are not the dark villain you think they are. And here, I should correct my earlier analogy—that E-books are not the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. They may actually be the Grinch…in as much as, at the end of the story, the pear-shaped green guy ended up not only giving all the presents back to the singing Who-villers, he created a flash mob and started a big party as well.

How E-books Helped Environmentalists Spread Awareness To People Worldwide

This is a guest post written by Kathleen Hubert

E-books are becoming more and more popular as time progresses. They have been able to raise awareness about issues that were previously unknown. The environmentalist movement is one beneficiary of the growth in popularity of e-books.

Increased Exposure
Before E-books, in order to learn more about something, you had to get a book out about it from a library or buy one from a book store. That created a couple of problems relating to exposure. There are some places where people don’t have easy access to a library or a bookstore. In those places it was difficult to learn more about the environmentalist movement. Sometimes, even if they did have access to a book store or library, but they felt it wasn’t worth the trouble of looking for. Regardless of the reason the rising popularity of e-book helps both of those issues.

The internet is very prominent all of over the world today, which e-books makes information much more accessible. Since e-books are downloaded from any computer with internet access you no longer need to go to a library or a bookstore to get a book. You can just download one from the internet.

Increased Portability
Another large problem that people face with books is that over a long enough period of time they take up a lot of space. Once you develop a big collection of books you need to actually start buying additional furniture to house the books and keep them in order. E-books help to cut down on the storage requirements for reading material, which is another way that e-books help the environmentalist movement. You can keep an e-book on an iPod, iPhone, Android, or other mobile device and read them there. You don’t have to worry about carrying around a book everywhere since many of the devices you can read an e-book with you can fit in your pocket.

It’s Cheaper
One of the largest problem that faced groups who wanted to get information out there about a movement or a problem that the world faced is that it’s expensive. No matter what the information is about, getting it to large amounts of people costs a lot of money. If you want to put an article in a magazine, you have to pay the magazine publisher money. If you want to publish an entire book about a cause you have to pay a book publisher to get everything all setup and in motion. That takes both a large amount of time and money.

E-books cost significantly less to produce and distribute. You don’t have to deal with a book publisher and there are a number of places that allow you to distribute e-books for free. The environmentalist movement has benefitted greatly from the increased popularity of e-books, due to it being cheap, easily accessible, and very portable.

Kathleen Hubert is a blogger who writes on a variety of different sites. Check out more of her work at Prefab Houses.

Where consumers REALLY buy ebooks?

"Nearly 81% of eReader Owners Would ‘Likely’ Buy eBooks Online from Indie Bookstores" - this was the headline of an article I read last week on GalleyCat, quoting a Digital Book World and Verso survey. Really? Does it sounds realistic? I'm afraid not.

Just to give you the full quote, it says "nearly 81 percent of eReader owners would “likely” buy eBooks online from independent booksellers–as long as the prices were competitive.". It reminded me of similar headlines I have read in the past, such as these ones:

• Three-quarters (77%) of consumers describe themselves as green — that is, actively living their lives consciously of their health and environment, according to a survey by Yahoo!
  

• According to a BCG’s report, 34% of the public systematically look for and often purchase green products. (2008 figures)

• A new Pike Research survey finds that 44 percent of consumers are “extremely” or “very” interested in purchasing a plug-in electric vehicle (PEV)
  

• Fifteen percent of U.S. consumers are very or extremely likely to purchase a vehicle that has plug-in hybrid technology, not taking into account estimated market prices, according to Harris Interactive’s AutoTECHCAST U.S. study

One thing that is common to all of these findings is that although they're very optimistic, they're not real. People say one thing on these surveys and do something else in real life. Otherwise, we would already have a very large green market.

Independent bookstores account for about 10% of the industry’s retail market overall, so it doesn't make too much sense that the same readers who generally choose to ignore independent bookstores and but their paper books somewhere else, will suddenly show affection towards these stores and buy there their e-books.

The right question I believe is not where readers are likely to buy their ebooks but where they already do it. If you ask this question, you will probably receive different results.

For example, a survey conducted by the Codex Group in early November of 6,250 frequent book buyers found according to Publishers Weekly that "more book buyers acquiring their e-books for the iPad from Amazon's Kindle store rather than through Apple's iBookstore, with the Kindle store accounting for 40% of e-book sales for the iPad and the iBookstore 29% (one factor limiting sales through the iBookstore is that Random House e-books are not directly available there because RH is not using the agency model). "

As you can see from the graph with the Codex Group's survey results, among iPad owners the market share of independent bookstores is somewhere between 0%-19%. It doesn't necessarily indicate that this is this would be the same with the general population of e-book readers, but it definitely looks more realistic than 81%.

In all, my guestimation is that when it comes to ebooks, the market share of independent bookstores will be between 5%-10%, as the competition online is more fierce than the competition offline. But, that's only my guestimation - to get a real sense of what's going on we'll have to wait to a survey that will look at the places readers actually buy their e-books.

Until then don't confuse attitudes with behavior.

You can find more resources on the future of bookstores on our website at www.ecolibris.net/bookstores_future.asp

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Kindle and Sony Reader - big hits on the holiday season

Following yesterday's post on Amazon's successful holiday season and eco-friendly it is to buy online, we also tried to check out how e-books were doing this month.

We didn't find much data on e-books, but we did find an interesting article on the New York Times that reported on good sales for Amazon's Kindle. Maybe too good - there are no sales figures but we do know that the $359 Kindle, it is out of stock and unavailable until February. Actually, PC Magazine reported already on December 1st that "Amazon now lists the Kindle's shipping date as 11 to 13 weeks".

Apparently it's the "fault" of Oprah Winfrey, who praised the Kindle on her show in October, and got many people to buy it. I guess Amazon didn't take Oprah into consideration and hence left with not enough Kindle devices for the holiday season.

The NYT reports that "the shortage is providing an opening for Sony, which embarked on an intense publicity campaign for its Reader device during the gift-buying season. The stepped-up competition may represent a coming of age for the entire idea of reading longer texts on a portable digital device."

Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division, is quoted in the article saying that the sales of Reader 700, a $400 device, "had tripled this holiday season over last, in part because the device is now available in the Target, Borders and Sam's Club chains." He also said Sony had sold more than 300,000 devices since the debut of the original Reader in 2006.

How is it compared with the Kindle? it's hard to tell. Estimates mentioned in the article are anywhere between 260,000-1,000,000 units, and that's before Winfrey's endorsement.

Still, to put things in propotion we have to remember that e-books are still small fraction of the market. According to the artilce and other sources publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster say that the sales of e-books for any device constitute less than 1 percent of total book sales.

More related links:

Happy Holidays for Sony Reader by Craig Morgan Teicher - Publishers Weekly, December 22

No Happy Holidays For Publishing (Host Scott Simon speaks to Charlotte Abbott, contributing editor for Publishers Weekly) - NPR, December 20

E-books vs. paper books - Eco-Libris resource page

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris
www.ecolibris.net

Random House is offering 7,000 more titles in digital format

More and more books are available as e-books and that's not really big news anymore. But big publishers that significantly increase the availability of their books in digital form, or like Treehugger call them "hot for e-books", still is. Especially when it's the biggest one - Random House.

Yes, PhysOrg is reporting today that Random House, the world's largest English-language general trade book publisher, announced that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

The publisher is almost doubling the books they have in electronic format - from more than 8,000 to nearly 15,000. I believe that this move is in accordance with Random House's increased e-books sales (according to their vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, sales have increased by triple digit percentages in 2008), as well as with their willingness to diversify their platform and provide more options to readers.

As their VP for digital operations reported much of the significant increase in e-book sales are thanks to Amazon.com’s Kindle reader. I wonder how the current economic will influence the sales of e-books in the next couple of month. My guesstimation is that we'll see very little growth with e-books sales because of the Kindle's relatively high price. Still, it's cheaper to buy an e-book than a book and therefore I think we'll still see sales growing and not decreasing.

All in all we shouldn't forget that we're still talking about a niche with market share of about 1% of the whole book sales market.

And what about the green aspect of this move? will thousands of additional books available in digital form be better the environment or not? well, e-books don’t need paper and therefore no trees are cut down which is a good thing. They don’t need transportation or physical storage and therefore no extra costs and extra footprint are required to bring the book from the publisher to the reader. Yet, other factors to be considered, especially with regards to e-book readers such as their production, materials used, energy required for the reader’s use, and how recyclable they are.

So what’s the verdict? We still don’t know as we’re lacking a full life-cycle assessment of reading e-books using kindle or other similar electronic book readers. Until we have that, we can’t really tell for sure if and to what extent e-books, including the new 7,000 Random House titles, are more environmentally-friendly in comparison to paper made books.

More links on e-books:

E-books vs. paper books - resources page on Eco-Libris website

eBooks - A Greener Choice or Not?

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Plant a tree for every book you read!

My article about the book industry's key elements for green future on Vulpes Libris

Vulpes Libris invited me to take part and write an article for their Environment Week, and so I happily did. The article is about few key elements that can significantly impact the future of the book industry and determine how green it will be.

You can find it here - http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/raz-godelnik-from-eco-libris-talks-about-the-future-of-the-book/.

The whole Environment Week is full with great articles and topics and you are welcome to check them out. Here is the program of this week:

MONDAY: Naturalist Scott Weidensaul travels the world seeking lost species in The Ghost with Trembling Wings, which Jackie finds riveting.

TUESDAY: We have a contribution from Raz Godelnik, CEO of Eco Libris, a company specialising in sustainable reading.

WEDNESDAY: Mary talks to Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees about climate change, the need to respond to environmental challenges, his frustration with global warming deniers and the power of books.

THURSDAY: We have a guest piece from Lizzie Rushton, a geographer writing about Christian environmentalism based on controversial interpretations of the Book of Revelation.

FRIDAY: To raise our spirits, Mary is back again with a review of Andrew Simms’ (ed.) Do Good Lives have to Cost the Earth? (The answer, in conclusion, being no.)

SATURDAY: Leena reviews Nature’s Child: Encounters with Wonders of the Natural World in which John Lister-Kaye, nature writer and conservationist, writes about bringing up her young daughter to have a close relationship with nature.

SUNDAY: Some book recommendations from The Soil Association.

Also, don't forget to enter the giveaway of How Can I Stop Climate Change? here!

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Plant a tree for every book you read!

Grateful Dead as a model for the publishing industry in the digital age

Paul Krugman is one of my favorite editorial writers in the New York Times. Today he wrote a very interesting column on the future of the publishing industry in the digital age ('Bits, Bands and Books.')

Krugman's advice to publishers: take an example from the Grateful Dead. In other words he offers a strategy of "giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia", or if you translate it to publishing terminology - "books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors' other activities, such as live reading with paid admission".

Too futuristic? maybe. Interesting and worth thinking about? Definitely!

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

What's up with Amazon's Kindle?

Last September we updated you on Amazon.com efforts to unveil in October their new e-book reader - the Kindle.

Today the New York Times reports that it seems that the company has pushed back that date and is aiming for an introduction by the end of this year.

So, if you are waiting for the Kindle, hold your horses at least until next month. I guess the delay is for the best, as Amazon is trying to come out to the market with the best product possible. According to the item "publishing executives say Amazon is trying to work out technology kinks in the Kindle and bring as many titles — books, magazines and newspapers — onto the service as possible before introduction."

Well, we'll have to wait and see if the Kindle will be able to change the current reality, where e-books represent only a tiny part of the $35 billion a year book business. My guess is that we'll have to wait to Kindle 2.0 and more probably to Kindle 3.0 or 4.0 before we see any significant change in the market share of e-books.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays! !

The future of e-books

Have you have read an electronic book? I haven't.. I'm not the type of person who will read a book from his cell phone or those other small gadgets that you can download books to. I guess that I'm, like most people, waiting for an e-book reader that will be user-friendly and affordable. So far there were none, but according to an article yesterday on the New York Times (Are Books Passe? Web giants envision the next chapter), significant advances are on the way and maybe faster than we think.

The main progress is made by Amazon.com that according to the article will unveil in October their new e-book reader. The new device won't be that affordable - it will be priced at $400 to $500. Yet, it is going to be wirelessly connected (but only to Amazon's e-book store of course), which is a big improvement in comparison with older e-book devices that had to be connected to the computer in order to download books or articles.

The article is trying to figure out if we're on the verge of a significant breakthrough in electronic books, which seemed very promising a while ago, but eventually had a very disappointing history. Overall, according to the article, there's a reason to be optimistic this time, but we still have a long way ahead of us until the e-book will become common.

Eco-Libris supports the concept of e-books as a sustainable alternative to books made of paper. Yet, we know it can take many years until e-books will be available for everyone. In the meantime we call all book lovers not to sit aside and wait, but to take an action and plant a tree for every book they read.

Raz