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Random HouseSmall publishers aren’t the only ones who may feel grumpy about OverDrive, the besieged distributor and retailer that charges one-book publishers $300 a year in storage fees. Random House’s traffic rank for contentlinkinc.com, the domain associated with the ContentLink eBook Store which uses OverDrive-provided DRM and e-commerce-related services, isn’t even on Alexa’s list of the top 100,000 Web sites. ContentLink’s three-month average, as noted by an Alexa link from Blackmask Online, is a pathetic 576,691.

Mind, you OverDrive isn’t be the only reason here for the debacle, and, of course, the Random House part of the Bertelsmann conglomerate focuses on its own books rather than using a wider variety with other publishers included. But the DRM-stunted performance is still an utter disgrace compared to, say, Fictionwise, which comes in at 11,305–or eBooks.com at 18,873, Blackmask at 52,432 or eBookAd at 92,519. Ebooks.com appears to sell mostly DRMed titles, Fictionwise and eBooks.com carry a mix of DRMed and nonDRMed books, and Blackmask and eBookAd have none. Of the big distributions, I suspect that none except for OverDrive are really DRM fanatics. This is something pushed on them through the software interests and certain less than fully enlightened publishers. Many other houses know the score and perhaps can get the Open eBook Forum, run by OverDrive founder Steve Potash, to change direction.

Three-month figures: More TeleRead traffic than OverDrive retail traffic–even though our ad and promo budget is $0

OverDrive’s own retail operation, Ebookexpress.com, ranks 334,177 even though Yahoo redirected traffic to the OverDrive retail subsidiary after the Y people shut down their e-bookstore. Actually even TeleRead, a highly specialized site with no ad or promo budget and a rank of 299,380, does better than either ContentLink or Ebookexpress in the three-month Alexa rankings.

Yes, I know. To visit a site isn’t to buy books there (TeleRead doesn’t sell any), and profits count in the end, not just raw revenue–not to mention the fact that distribution activites won’t draw as many visitors as retail-oriented ones. But could it be that book buyers can smell the DRM a zillion miles away and choose to keep their distance? Not that DRM is all, as eBooks.com shows. But I suspect that the eBooks.com is doing enough other things right to compensate for the damage from the DRM. If nothing else, the name gives it a wonderful headstart over all rivals.

All book-related Web traffic: Just a speck of N.Y. Times’

Certainly the low traffic numbers for e-book sites are in keeping with the industry’s pigmy-sized sales of only $20-$25 million a year. Within newspapers, the New York Time by itself ranked 78. I don’t expect bookstores and the like to do as well as the world’s leading newspaper–even RandomHouse.com, RH’s site playing up p-books, is a mere 8,190–but I think the discrepancies still say something. If Random House and the other biggies know what’s good for ‘em, they’ll stop letting the big software companies, DRM zealots and other proprietary formatters set the tone for the e-book business. A Universal Consumer Format, less fixation on Draconian DRM and more on reader-friendly business models could go a long way toward reviving the sick e-book industry. The endlessly hyped growth figures for e-books are laughable. It’s like keeping track of the division of bacteria.

In fairness to OverDrive: The one-week average for OverDrive’s retail side was 198,697, an impressive improvement, and I see that ContentLink’s weekly rank is now at 332,501. But those two are still miles away from the top 100,000 ranking.

(Big thanks to Blackmask for jogging me to check up on these fun numbers–via David Moynihan’s well-done take on OverDrive.)

 
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