Several hundred Sony Readers will soon reach Random House staffers, according to Publishers Weekly—this on top of other Reader-related adoptions at companies such as Hachette, S&S and St. Martin’s.
Manuscripts will get to Random’s out-of-town sales reps faster and without any paper for them to lug around. And that’s not all for publishers using the Reader. “We looked at how much we were spending on paper, postage, ink,” Phil Madens at Hachette is quoted. “A 400-page manuscript would cost $7 to print. In the first couple of seasons, the Reader will pay for itself.” Hachette is using readers in editorial and sales alike—also in the plans of S&S and St. Martin’s, which hasn’t done a full rollout but is optimistic. “We started this around last Thanksgiving,” Hachette’s Madens says. “I’ve been here 17 years, and I’ve never seen anything accepted so quickly.”
So if publishers are so gung ho on e-book readers for internal use, just when will they go all the way on E? How about experimenting with no DRM or with social DRM, so E is less Rube Goldbergish for consumers—and then ordinary mortals can get their books faster, including those outside the States? And if the publishers can lean on the IDPF to develop the promising but flawed .epub standard to the max and in a timely way, then so much the better.
In other e-gizmo news, Bookeen says a firmware upgrade for the Cybook Gen3 is due in the first week of April (via MobileRead).
