Make or Break

As soon as I ask for information on ebooks sales Waterstone’s oblige by releasing figures for sales of ebooks from their website. Wow – the power of the blogosphere comes to Publishing Lore.

In fact David Kohn appears to have talked a little about this at the recent Galley Club meeting – I wish I had been there. At least the Atlantic Books blogger has put David Kohn’s absurd statistic about more ebook sales on Christmas day than real books sales in its place. I think this meaningless stat was there to distract from the reality that actually sales of ebooks aren’t that great.

Waterstone’s claim to have sold 30,000 Sony Readers and 75,000 ebooks. That’s two and a half books per reader. If you assume, as I do, that ebook readers are bought for or by avid readers then this doesn’t seem like very high sales to me. I’d love to know how many paper books these Sony Reader owners have bought in the same period but we’ll never know. I’ve certainly bought lots more books than this in the time that the Sony Reader has been out.

One of my authors has just bought a reader and I look forward to hearing what they think about it. I might need to consider producing their book as an ebook but am yet to be convinced there is a market out there.

This blog is in danger of being dominated by discussions of ebooks – so will rest my case there for a bit though 2009 looks to be shaping into the make or break year for ebooks, so I am sure I’ll revisit the subject.