IBPA Publishing University: General Session – E-Magination

Panel: Christopher Kenneally, Copyright Clearance Center, Moderator; Mark Coker, Smashwords; David Hetherington, BLIO/Baker & Taylor, Professor at Pace University; Jack Sallay, Vook; Sara Nelson, O Magazine.

Kenneally: ebook sales rose 252% in first quarter to $91 million. Print category sales growing as well.

Coker: I’m an outsider to publishing. Started it because couldn’t get a book published. Brought Silicon Valley mindset to publishing. Let readers decide what’s worth reading. Started May, 2008, now published 13,000 original ebooks which are now available through all major ebook retailers. Reverses traditional model in terms of paying royalties – take only 15% 1,500 new books every month. A lot are garbage but a lot are brilliant. Print will diminish as a format, ebooks will be over 50% of books. Ebooks will bring new life to books. The Q1 numbers show ebooks up to 7% of sales and expect them to go up to 10% by end of year. DRM is counterproductive. Piracy is not the biggest threat, obscurity is the biggest threat. Growing body of people who believe that piracy may be a benefit to publishers, because pirate would never buy the book anyway.

Hetherington: an amazing number of his students want to start their own publishing business. This time last year he never would have expected ebooks to have moved so fast. Within a year the trade business will hit $1/2 Billion in the next year. Ebook takes significant risk out of managing inventory give the problem of returns. BLIO: best software app he’s ever seen. Converts electronic files into a mirror image of the book on any device. Anxious for content, will convert files for free. Product will launch on July 1 with 250,000 trade books. Capacity for enhancements is there but doesn’t have to be turned on. Will be happy to bring in content that is not enriched. Curse of the textbook publisher is the used textbook market. Digital textbooks take the used market out of the equation.

Sallay: blends video and mixed media into a single form. Experience on the web has trained readers to expect something more than text. Enhanced ebooks don’t exist yet and so can’t define them now. Have to be very careful not to be too distracting the readers. Must allow readers to have the experience they want – can turn stuff on or off for example. Targeting readers who have grown up in a screen culture. Vook is somewhere between a website and a book. Most popular enhancements, as opposed to the best, in the near future will be hyperlinks, images, interactivity.

Nelson: tradition pbook is not dead, but there will be fewer takers of that product. However, the “book” is much expanded. A real snobbism in the book business that tends to think that ebooks, etc. are not really books. For people who really like to read, the “new” book is really just a format question. The publishing industry mistakenly blames technology and says it will be the death of the book instead of expanding the definition of the book. A deep seated fear of anything technological in the publishing business, but this is eroding a bit. Originally was an advisor to Vook and was pretty skeptical. But is now seeing that new technologies are creating more readers rather than taking readers away. Tend to think of ebook as the mass market version of the book. And will be a place for both this and books that are meant to keep.