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In case you missed ‘em: E-book stats you’ve never seen before—documenting the shortage of e-titles from big publishers
March 31, 2008 | 8:05 am
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By David Rothman
Over the weekend we published some eye-opening numbers from the Publishing Trends newsletter—check ‘em out if you haven’t already.
So how many e-books are major publishers in the U.S. really offering? Would you believe that at this point, even Random House has fewer than 7,000 e-titles available, a little short of Wiley’s number. And HarperCollins and S&S? Just 4,000 each. Penguin, Harlequin and Hachette? Even fewer, individually. While Holtzbrinck subsidiaries aren’t in the stats, I doubt their inclusion would change things that much. For perspective, remember that Amazon’s Kindle store carries more than 110,000 books, newspapers and blogs, meaning that just a minority of its offerings are probably coming from these majors, and of course the K-store’s entire inventory is minuscule compared to the millions of commercial p-books out there.
Clearly a shortage of content from big publishers remains an issue in the E vs. P debate, in spite of the number of small e-press titles out there and in spite of hefty increases in recent years.
Even the Kindle store doesn’t pick up every best-seller. What’s more, remember that many e-books are specialized academic works or steamy genre novels rather than mainstream fare. There’s a place for all kinds of books. But right now readers just aren’t getting all the titles they need in E, partly because DRM and other eBabel-related issues have complicated life for shoppers and many publishers and e-bookstores, thus reducing the potential rewards for publishers of all sizes.
Detail: That’s an older cover from PT.
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Technorati Tags: Publishing Trends,Random House,Wiley,S&S,Simon & Schuster,Penguin,Harlequin,Hachette Group,Holtzbrinck,Amazon.com
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Comments:
If you show all Kindle books, then sort from low price to high, you’ll find all kinds of weird stuff for under $1. Oddly, they don’t tell you how long the file is in pages or words, just how big it is. How hard would it be to give a word count?
I think the reason it looks like the big publishers aren’t doing much is because they’re focussing on putting up their new books. As anyone in the book business will tell you, most sales are generated in the first few months a book is available. Putting up a back-list book won’t generate much revenue. Of course with a lot of the back list, rights are an issue. Since older contracts were signed before eBooks became standard, the publishers may not own digital rights.
If you looked at the percentage of books sold rather than total titles, I think you’d find that there was pretty good coverage in electronic format. I know Harlequin recently moved up to 100% of their new novels coming out in electronic format.
Of course smaller publishers like BooksForABuck.com are the other way around. More of our books are available electronically than in paper format.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Rob,
I thought epublishing was to be the saviour of the backlist?
Good point, Bob.
Once a book is ePublished, it becomes perpetually available. But looking at my own statistics, most sales are still new books in their first quarter or so of availability. Two differences:
1. I do get a trickle of sales for older books. In contrast, major publishers get essentially zero (often even negative because of late returns) sales for older/out of print books.
2. When I release a new book by an author with a backlist, this generally creates a (small) flurry of sales for their backlist as new readers become aware of the author and look for more of his/her work.
The point I’m trying to make is not that ePublishing isn’t good for the backlist, just that, with limited time and resources, it makes sense to concentrate on new books, creating a digital backlist going forward. With unlimited resources and with clear rights (something not available on most books released in the 1990s and earlier), it would be great to release those as well.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com