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.

Vanity Fair

Yesterday I spotted my 3^rd Sony Reader in the wild. This time it was being used by a woman in her 20s on the train.

So already my insignificant statistics have been proven worthless. It seems that it isn't just men indulging their stereotypical love of gadgets who have Sony Readers.

However the woman on the train was reading Vanity Fair which almost certainly is one of the free texts on the Sony Reader and this I believe strengthens my supposition that Sony Readers are being used as the best and cheapest way for avid readers to get their hands on 100 classics that they would otherwise not buy or read. After all, 100 classics from Wordsworth would cost you £250 - £25 more than the Sony Reader and they'd take up a whole lot of space. If you just want to tick off the classics on your read list – this must be the way to do it.

So will these Reader owners ever get through these 100 titles and the 26,000 available at Project Gutenberg and actually buy an ebook? I'm beginning to have my doubts.

It seems there are other Reader owners out there who have yet to buy an ebook. Scott Pack is interviewed today on the North Meadow Media blog and claims not to have bought an ebook yet for his Sony Reader, though he has speculated on ebook sales.

Perhaps for the publishing world, Waterstone's announcement that they've sold 30,000 Readers isn't as significant as I thought. What we really need are some figures on their sales of ebooks.

A Tramp Abroad

Having expressed surprise at the sales of the Sony Reader just a few days ago, I have now seen TWO readers in the wild whilst tramping around the country.

I saw my first on the tube in London. It was being read rather ostentatiously, by a man in his late 30s or early 40s. I don't know what he was reading on it.

The second was being read by my neighbour on a recent train journey. Again a man, this reader was probably in his late 50s or early 60s and a peak over his shoulder revealed he was reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which I imagine came free on the Reader.

These two sightings, though statistically insignificant, did make me wonder:-

• Are ebook readers more likely to by purchased by men indulging a stereotypical love of gadgets?


• If ebook readers are more likely to be owned by men will this lead to many/enough ebook sales given that most books are bought by women?
  
• Given that ebook readers are only likely to be bought by or for avid readers will they generate significant sales of new ebooks? After all, even an avid reader is likely to find plenty of unread classic titles amongst the 100 you get free on the Sony Reader.

Now if you were an avid reader and ebook reader owner you'd have access to the 26,000 classics from the Project Gutenberg collection (including today's inaugural speech from President Barack Obama). Given this, would you ever BUY an ebook?

Perhaps publishers of contemporary ebooks should hope that owners of ebook readers agree with Mark Twain, coincidentally of course the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, who described a classic as "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read".

Critical Mass

Waterstone’s have announced that they have sold 30,000 Sony eReaders in the UK. Sony claim 300,000 have been sold worldwide of which I guess most have been sold in technology mad Japan and South Korea. Taken with reports of large sales of the Amazon Kindle there are clearly lots more people with eReaders than I would have believed.

I have to say I am quite astounded and will really have to rethink my view of the future of ebooks. Until now I have been an ebook sceptic. I’ve been in publishing long enough to have seen two or three digital revolutions that ‘were going to be the death of books’. All of these claims have to date been unfounded. I am sure that this new ebook revolution won’t mean the death of books but I am starting to seriously think that there may be a sustainable market for consumer ebooks.

Until now I believed that consumer ebooks wouldn’t really take off without the presence of a critical mass of devices out in the wider market place and I wasn’t convinced that the critical mass would ever develop. I am not sure that 30,000 is that critical mass but it must be getting close. 250,000 Kindles in the USA must be close to a critical mass for that market.

If only the two devices didn’t use different file formats publishers would have 500,000 devices to make ebooks for, instead of having to make two file formats. Given that Amazon have lead the way in the commercial sale of DRM free music which has forced Apple to sell DRM free music on iTunes, it will be interesting to see if Amazon persist in using a proprietary DRM system for the Kindle.

With any luck the Kindle 2 is being delayed so that they can convert it to take epub formats. Given this and a European launch of the Kindle and I’ll have to looking at ebook production myself and that will be a change.