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Housekeeping: E-book-marketing item and VitalSource replies—and a reminder to Jon Noring
April 22, 2007 | 9:19 pm
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By David Rothman
Housekeeping: Yes, I still plan that item telling how to spread the word about e-books to prospective buyers, but it won’t show up tonight. I’m out of time.
In a slightly overlapping vein, see Bob Russell’s MobileRead item on Darrell Bain‘s use of spare p-books to help sell e-books (photo). “”I’m doing something right now sort of the opposite of giving away e-books. Each month from my web site newsletter…I give away five free trade paperback books as promotion for my e-books and print books both! This works fine for me at present since I have a surplus of some of my books and does appear to increase sales, particularly of my e-books.”
- Separately, thanks to Willie Abrams and Manton Reece at VitalSource for responding here, here, here and here to the TeleBlog posts on the distrib stats for .vbk books and the quick review we did. I’d still love to know more about the stats in the press release. But it’s the actual software, not the publicity, that’s of most interest to me. It turns out that, as I’d hoped, people can already share both highlights and comments—and do so with just their friends or the whole world. Great!
- Meanwhile I’ll await with interest Jon Noring’s comments on the IDPF specs—on such issues as reliable interbook linking, one of the goals of OpenReader.
Related: IDPF conference call May 22 on the new standards. Participation will be limited to 50 people, and you need to sign up by April 26.
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Comments:
Thank you for your comments on the recent release covering the distribution of VitalSource’s 1 billionth e-book. Manton Reece and Willie Abrams have responded separately to some of the technical issues raised on the TeleRead site. I wanted to respond directly to your question about the 1 billion e-books and how we arrived at that number. As Willie Abrams mentioned in a separate post, a substantial part of VitalSource’s business comes from partnerships with OEM computer manufacturers. VitalSource has preload agreements with Lenovo (formerly IBM), Gateway and Apple. To date, VitalSource has distributed a library of roughly 4000 assets (more than 2000 of which are e-books) to a user base of nearly 500,000 students in K12 districts and Higher Education Institutions across the United States. When combined with sales from other channels, the total number of VitalSource e-books in customers’ hands exceeds 1 billon.