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| The Big eBook Evolutions |
January 19, 2004 |
By Peter Wolchak
Robert J. Sawyer has been called Canada’s most successful science fiction writer, and with good reason. He has sold 17 novels to major American publishers, his fiction has been translated into 11 languages and he has won 30 national and international writing awards, including sci-fi’s top award, the Hugo, for his novel Hominids.
It’s ironic, then, that such a leading figure in the fiction world essentially stopped reading fiction a few years ago. He discovered he just couldn’t handle paper books anymore.
“I had given up reading fiction for pleasure because I found I could only read for about 20 minutes before I started to get eye fatigue,” Sawyer said. He believes this is because reading on paper causes the eye to do a lot of extra work. “With a book there is a bowing of the paper; it curves out and in to a degree that you would never accept from a computer monitor today. So with a book the focal length changes constantly as you go over the lines…and the eyes have to compensate for that.”
But Sawyer is now back to reading fiction, thanks to a Sony CLIÉ. “Now I can read literally for hours on my PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) with no eye fatigue at all.”
The CLIÉ isn’t his first electronic book device; Sawyer also owns older devices including two Franklin eBookMans and a Rocket eBook. However, he found these were bulky and offered a limited range of reading choices. Also, the screens back then were of middling quality.
It was modern PDAs—with their high-resolution, no-flicker LCD screens and access to thousands of fiction titles — that brought Sawyer back to the fiction fold.
GETTING THE WORDS OUT
Industry experts say that experience — having people simply try an e-book on a current device — is critical to growing the market.
“People say ‘I love the smell and feel of books and I am never going to give up my books,’” said Scott Pendergrast, co-owner of Fictionwise, an e-book retail site in Chatham, N.J. “My response is always, ‘Have you tried an e-book recently?’ And they never have.
For a lot of people…when they read a good book on a high-quality PDA they get engrossed in it, just as they would if they were reading a paperback.”
Palm Digital Media, which has hundreds of thousands of regular customers and lists almost 12,000 titles for sale, bills itself as the largest e-book retailer in the world, yet it faces the same issue, according to Mike Violano, its senior vice-president of business development.
“E-books are still one of the best-kept secrets and customer awareness is the single biggest hurdle for us to overcome,” he said.
But e-books have been around for years, so why is awareness an issue? The fault, many say, lies with business analysts who predicted a few years ago that readers would toss their paperbacks and pump huge profits into e-book ventures. When the industry didn’t skyrocket, many wrote off the whole concept and that stain has stuck.
“During the Internet boom a number of analysts came out and said the e-book industry would almost instantly be a $1 billion business,” said Fictionwise’s Pendergrast. “Based on that a lot of publishers put a lot of money into their e-book divisions — we’re talking staffs of 30, a lot of salary. But the Internet market blew up and the ebook market never took off the way it was supposed to, and a lot of negative press came out of that for two years.
“So I’m kind of negative on these analysts.”
But consistent with many bubble-andbust Internet ideas it is those who persevered and survived who are now being rewarded. Profit expectations have been
lowered and, assessed against these new metrics, e-book companies are doing quite well. Fictionwise sold 3,000 books in its first month of operation back in June 2000, and sales have increased every quarter since. The company expects to rake in US$1 million in sales in 2003.
Over at the e-book division of publisher Simon & Schuster sales are growing in the double digits year over year, according to Keith Titan, senior director of ePublishing and eCommerce.
“If you look at the way consumers approach all media it’s moving towards digital consumption. E-books are not like what happened with MP3s, which went from zero to 100 miles per hour in a year,” Titan said. “With e-books it’s more of a gradual increase, but even if the growth hasn’t been explosive like the analysts said, most publishers are reporting double-digit growth year over year.”
Overall, in fact, the industry is quite healthy. Worldwide sales are expected to top US$10 million in 2003, according to the Open eBook Forum in New York, which also said that while traditional print publishing is increasing by only five per cent worldwide, e-book sales jumped by 30 per cent compared to the same period in 2002.
THE RETAIL LANDSCAPE
These numbers pose an interesting question for traditional book retailers: if e-book sales continue to rise faster than print sales, how long will it be before huge brick-and-mortar stores full of dead trees are outmoded?
No one knows for sure, but the retail outlets may begin to feel some heat within a few years. The first challenge is e-books are simply more convenient than their pulp cousins. Buying a book entails getting to a store, searching for the book, queuing at the checkout and then returning home to read. Even if readers opt to purchase books online there is still a wait for delivery, and the delivery charge.
Contrast that, say e-book proponents, with the electronic world. “You can hear about a great book on the way home from work and five minutes after arriving home you have it downloaded to a PDA and you’ve begun reading it. You can then put that PDA in a shirt pocket and take it on a plane or a train,” said Simon & Schuster’s Titan.
And that PDA can hold more than one book, a feature Sawyer appreciates. “I have a 128MB memory stick in my CLIÉ and it is full of books. I carry about 50 books with me because I travel a great deal and I don’t know what I’m going to want to read when I’m on the road.
“The portability of a whole library appeals to me enormously.”
And then there is the price issue. Back when analysts first looked at the e-publishing industry they saw the major costs ebooks would save included printing, warehousing and transportation.
By sidestepping these costs e-books would sell for much less, they concluded, and people would glom onto them in big numbers.
This, too, didn’t happen. Nervous that e-book sales would eat into their traditional business publishers kept prices high.
“Publishers are the most cowardly people in the world, and they were afraid e-books were going to destroy print publishing,” Sawyer said. “On the one hand, they wanted all the benefits of ebooks but on the other, they priced them to actually discourage their purchase.
“I was enormously pissed off at my publisher when my book Hominids, which won the Hugo award, was available in paperback for US$7.99 but was still being sold for US$21 as an e-book.”
But this situation is now improving as e-book prices have begun to fall. “My publisher has recently [figured out] this issue and you can now buy the e-book of Hominids, as an example, for US$4.99 and the paperback for US$7.99, so it’s getting closer to being appropriately priced,” Sawyer said. “My feeling is that an e-book should be half the price of the prevailing print edition. If a hardcover book is $35 you certainly should not pay more than
$17.50 for the e-book.”
Titan said Simon & Schuster has no set formula for setting the price of e-books relative to paper books. However, across the industry he believes new-release e-books are selling for 20 to 30 per cent less than hardcovers. “That can be a significant saving if you buy a lot of books.”
And it’s those regular readers traditional retailers may lose. In fact, among the top three e-book retailers — Amazon, Palm Digital Media and Fictionwise — there is not one traditional bookseller.
So are the established stores chasing this emerging e-book trend? One U.S. company, Barnes and Noble, is actually running the other way. The bookseller announced in September of last year that it was pulling out of the e-book market.
Sawyer thinks this is a surprisingly bad move. “Some booksellers and publishers are being ostriches on the issue of e-books.
They are saying ‘I don’t know how to deal with this, I’m not sure how to make money today so I am going to pretend they do not exist.’ Barnes and Noble will rue the day they dropped e-books.
“By the end of the 21st century we won’t be doing paper books except as an art form. We can’t continue to demolish trees at this rate. And…books are cumbersome and hard to store and they yellow with age, which means we are in the last century of print publishing being the dominant form. So all of these print publishers and distributors should be looking at how they can participate in this [electronic] landscape.”
In fact, that landscape will only get more populous as the word on e-books gets out and today’s youth enter book-buying age. After all, say “music” to anyone born after 1984 and it is “MP3” that pops to mind, not “album.” The same will happen with books. “The younger generation is very comfortable getting their information from a variety of means, many of them electronic,” said Palm Digital’s Violano, so when they want a book they’ll want it electronically.
And although the analyst predictions were originally off, the people who are actually making a living selling e-books today are optimistic about the future.
“Next year there will be a couple million more PDAs out there and more titles available,” said Fictionwise’s Pendergrast. “There is no possible scenario under which there will be fewer e-book sales next year than there were this year.”
Web books
Fictionwise http://www.fictionwise.com
Open eBook Forum http://www.openebook.org
Palm Digital Media http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com
Robert J. Sawyer http://www.sfwriter.com
Simon & Schuster http://www.simonsays.com
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