More musing on e-books, I'm afraid.
Kindle-owner Evan Schnittman on the OUP blog asks himself
Do I Believe in E-Books? and the answer in this very well argued piece is a cautious yes, particularly when it comes to the question of portability:
... those who are passengers for hours on end in planes, trains and automobiles are the true growth audience for ebooks. Ebooks are about convenience and are what I read when it’s impractical to read in print.
But he also admits to missing the permanence and physicality of books.
He argues in a follow-up post that e-books are only likely to have a very limited market share:
The reality is that even if the current audience of ebook users were to grow by magnitudes over the next few years, the total market would only reach 3 to 4% of print. Therefore we must admit to ourselves as an industry that ebooks will always be a small niche player as a standalone platform ...
and he therefore suggests that publishers:
... make them free with new book purchases.
And the idea isn't as stupid as it sounds:
Offering ebooks with print could create significant value-added marketing and merchandizing programs. Publishers, retailers, even wholesalers could dramatically benefit from such a plan as consumers could be asked to join affinity and membership programs, enroll in online ebook clubs, and register with publishers in order to download their books. Want your free ebook? Join our readers club and you can download it. Just a bit of info required – by the way, mind if we email you when a new title arrives?
Richard Lea in the Guardian reports on a couple of interesting publishing experiments.
HarperCollins is releasing complete texts from a small selection of authors for periods of a month to test how free access affects sales. One of the first to be selected for the experiment is Neil Gaiman who is asking his fans
to vote on his blog for which book is selected. (I want
Fragile Things!)
Gaiman reckons that it's about gaining an audience, and he says we usually get to know about a new author through a friend's recommendation, or by browsing in a library or a friend's bookshelves, but not usually by actually purchasing a book.*
Random House meanwhile has announced a pilot project to offer individual chapters of books for a small fee, which when you are talking about non-fiction titles and needing material for research, I reckon is a very good idea indeed.
But let's give the last word
to Nicholas Clee on the Guardian blog:
It is 17 years since the creation of the world wide web, and still no publisher has any idea how to deal with it. Is it a threat? An opportunity? Will it be the medium for the spread of free, mostly pirated texts, or will it broaden the market for authors' works? How do you promote books on the internet? By giving them away? By giving them away in snippets? By charging small sums for snippets? We haven't got a clue.
* (Interesting point, don't you think? I have discovered a couple of favourite authors by taking a risk - William Gibson and Etgar Keret - but usually have a good idea of what I want to buy before I go to the bookshop.)
Who's into historical fiction?