Isn’t it fun to parse news releases from e-book tech companies—especially those about formats? Just who will be King of the Tower of eBabel? Here’s the latest hype from the VitalSource division of Ingram Digital Group:
“VitalSource Technologies, Inc., developer of the most advanced e-book software, the VitalSource BookShelf, today announced that one billion e-books have been distributed using the company’s pioneering format, VitalBook. This milestone represents the largest number of commercial e-book titles distributed in a single format.”
Different e-book titles or just download numbers?
So, gang, are we talking about reader downloads or the number of titles available? I suspect downloads, but VitalSource’s language muddies things up through the use of the word “titles.”
Let’s do some math. I rely on orange juice, not coffee, to wake me up in the mornings. But assuming I can compute as well as the caffeine-wired crowd, a billion copies of books is the same as:
- 1,000 titles sold or loaned to a million people each.
- 10,000 titles for 100,000 readers each.
- 100,000 titles for 10,000 people each.
A new Mobipocket for the Ingram people?
Which combination is it; why didn’t VitaSource bother to explain the “billion”? I can’t stand the suspense and will e-mail the company for an explanation. As quoted in the release, CEO Frank Daniels III says of .vbk: “No other e-book format has achieved such widespread adoption.” So, Frank, why aren’t we seeing oodles of best-sellers in .vbk? Or is that on the way? Ingram owns Lightning Source. Is .vbk indeed going to end up as this e-distributor’s new alternative to Amazon-owned Mobipocket—now a format that LS uses in electronic distribution? I can recall a 2006 news release hinting of that possibility without mentioning Mobipocket by name; what’s up? Ah, the delights of the Tower of eBabel! If .vbk indeed makes it over to the commercial e-book side at the retail level in a big way, that’ll be one more format to torment readers. .VBK may be excellent—I intend to try it—but a good standardized e-format would be still better.
Random House and HarperCollins missing from publishers list
Meanwhile I don’t see Random House, HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck listed among the companies distributing books in Frank’s format. McGraw-Hill? Yes. Wiley? Yes. Pearson Ed Group? Yes. Not such a bad start. But we’re still talking about a format that yet to win over the hearts and minds of some of the biggest players.
So what about traffic on the VitalSource Web site? Might that hint of huge usage? Well, so you’ll know, Alexa.com says the three-month traffic rank of Adobe.com is an awseome 90, while Vitalsource.com’s is 771,355. Is VitalSource racking up huge sales to the mainland Chinese under a different name, just to guess about a weird possibility? Anything’s possible since VitalSource has some large partners that may want to brand the product themselves. I just want to know why such a bloody-popular e-book format has a flagship Web domain with such a low visitor count.
Another fun quote
One more quote from the VitalSource release: “VitalSource is commemorating the billionth e-book title distributed in its VitalBook (*.vbk) format. This represents the most prolific distribution of commercial e-books, in a single format, in digital publishing history.” Once again, the word “title” bewilders us. Repeat after me, Frank. A title—at least to unsuspecting laypeople—isn’t the same as a downloaded copy.
And another little statistical tidbid—some fascinating talk about piracy and the total size of the e-book universe: TeleBlog contributor Robert Nagle writes on the eBook Community List that “I was recently on a flight to Boston to give lecture about ebook technology. I sat next to a man who told me he had downloaded a 40 gigabyte torrent file of ebooks for his pda. Frankly, I was amazed. Does 40 gigs worth of ebooks even exist at this point?”
As someone who follows the ebook world fairly closely, I have to ask: what the hell is .vbk format? I’ve never heard of it!
I think the use of ‘title’ in the news release is fairly standard (if confusing). They mean individual copies.
Still, a billion? Like Robert, this is a format I’ve never heard of, had a single customer request for, until I did a bit of research, I didn’t even know what devices it runs on (it runs on the PC). They say it’s used for textbooks which may be why it hasn’t crossed my consciousness.
Still, a billion? That’s a lot of textbooks.
There is a flipside to this–if they’ve really distributed a billion books in a meaningful (meaning not just on CD’s but actually used), that’s a whole lot of eBooks. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that’s a meaningful percentage of total books sold over the past decade. So, if this means anything, it means there are more eBooks out there than any of us had imagined.
I wonder what share of that billion I’d get if I converted my books to VBK format? I’ll keep you posted.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Maybe they mean a couple of their books were used by spammers?
🙂
The first version of the VitalBook format came to market in 2000.
We didn’t use OEBPS (the only open e-Book standard of the day) because it was inadequate for our needs in serving our customers (at that point in time: Dentistry (our founder was a dentist) faculty & students) and for our publisher partners. Our primary objections were: difficulty of random access, ease of search, slow for large books with lots of figures and lack of DRM – I am sure there were others, but that was a long time ago and I can’t remember :-). Also, there weren’t good tools for authoring in OEBPS and none of the publishers we worked with had OEBPS titles marked up. (We paid for lots of our original titles to be marked up from the original paper editions. That first year, our content had to be delivered and read on a 8GB DVD-ROM because most of the student laptops we were installed on only had 6 GB hard drives!)
(I write all that because I know readers of this blog are interested in why people pick proprietary formats over open ones.)
Since then, we expanded to the broader Health Sciences market with titles in Nursing and Medicine also Vet. We put together a collection of classic works – the VitalSource Library (http://www.vitalsource.com/index/vs_library) – that is bundled by hardware manufacturers and has signifigant use in K-12 (really, 5 thru undergraduate) education. We have a signifigant collection of law titles as well.
Dentistry students can have anywhere from 100 to 200 titles (some more, some less), Library users have several thousand titles. The numbers vary from place to place given the curriculum and enviroment. I don’t know the numbers for Evolve Select.
Direct retail is very small portion of what we do, which explains our Alexa rank, and why many of your readers have, until now, not heard of us.
Hope this helps.