Peter Osnos on e-books

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By Paul Biba

Shelf Awareness is an excellent free daily newsletter that you can receive by email. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the book trade. In today’s issue they have a very informative interview with Peter Osnos, founder and editor-at-large of Public Affairs. You can subscribe to Shelf Awareness here. The following is short excerpt from today’s article.

Altering the current model is critical because the gradual increase in returns on front list to a range in some cases of 40%-50% is not sustainable, he said. And readers’ preferences concerning how they read are changing.

Already the market is moving into digital territory, as evidenced by the growth of Kindles, iPods, iPhones and more. “The way people are adapting to digital delivery is enormously important and in its own way enormously positive,” Osnos said.

He is concerned, however, about the role of booksellers, who “still have not yet accepted that digital delivery is a good thing and that it can be part of what they do,” he said. “There isn’t any reason any bookseller cannot completely embrace digital delivery.” He added that he had heard the reasons many booksellers give for remaining focused on traditional books–lack of time, energy and resources–and the feeling that e-books, POD and downloadable audio are marginal. “But they’re not marginal,” he stated emphatically.

Oddly many booksellers who have ABA E-commerce Solution (formerly BookSense.com) sites are unaware that they already have the capability to sell e-books. “They think of the e-book as some sort of adversary, but it’s just a commodity,” he continued.

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