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e-Books
and e-Publishing: Ignore
MS Reader & Palm OS at Your Own Peril
To date, the battle lines that have drawn up in the e-book and e-publishing arena, there are two sectors that every author, electronic or print, should pay attention to:
1. Traditional book publishing
2. Online ebook publishing
The traditional book publishing industry is wrestling with issues similar to the audio Recording industry: control of content. This battle will last many years, just as it continues in the recording industry.
For those authors and publishers that are focused at online distribution as their primary means to selling and marketing their e-books, the preferred tool for delivery of their content is PDF.
From an informal random survey conducted by B2B eBook Conference members, 69 of 100 online publishers and authors who exclusively use the Internet to sell their ebooks use the PDF format. Nearly all of the remaining authors/publishers used a proprietary .exe type ebook compiler. None offered their e-book for the Palm OS or Microsoft Reader. This is anecdotal information, but it is revealing indeed.
Contrast these figures in the traditional book publisher world: Nearly 100% of traditional book publishers distribute and support Adobe PDF or eBook Reader, Microsoft Reader, and the Palm OS platform. Barnes & Noble and Amazon, the top two online book sellers sell e-books in Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader and Microsoft Reader formats.
Consider this: The Association of American Publishers, Inc. (AAP) completed an extensive study of the ebook market last year. The study concluded that ebooks represent a significant opportunity. According to their forecasts, by 2005, ebooks are expected to account for almost ten percent of the total consumer publishing market. This represents an estimated incremental retail sales opportunity of $1.6 billion, and total projected retail sales of $2.3 billion for the trade publishing industry they project.
That represents a $3.8 billion market. And these figures don’t even incorporate the independent self-published author market. The figures from the AAP only come from their members: big book publishers.
With a market of this size, can you afford to produce or publish ebooks on only one platform? No. The message is this: look at the traditional book publishers as a trend indicator. These are slow moving, high cost and low risk oriented enterprises.
For authors and publishers regardless of which side of the industry and market you may fall on, you MUST offer your e-book on whatever platform your customers want or need and are willing to pay for. To ignore other key platforms may cost you considerable business.
While we believe the traditional book publishing industry will NEVER dictate an ebook platform for consumers, the vendor community is swirling around trying to get their tools adopted as such.
As independent authors and publishers, including self-published authors, you should give some serious weight to offering your material on the all three major platforms the traditional book publishing industry supports, including:
Microsoft Reader platform - At the Seybold Seminar at the Javits Center in New York City earlier this year, Microsoft indicated MS Reader had a market of six million potential readers, including four million Pocket PC e-book-enabled devices and two million downloads of MS Reader for desktop/laptop computers.
Palm Digital Media – At the same Seybold Seminar, this subsidiary of Palm, Inc. claimed to be the largest seller of e-books. Mike Segroves of PDM said, " PDM, whose e-book reader is bundled with every Palm device, of which there are 20 million, offers 4,000 e-book titles that can be bought only through its Web site. He said the site has 100,000 customers who buy at least five times a year with an average sale of $100 per customer. Because of their lower cost, portability and multiple functions, "Handhelds are preferred by consumers for reading e-books.”
Adobe, who claims to have over 3 million Acrobat eBook Readers downloaded and over 30 million Acrobat Readers downloaded.
In one industry discussion panel at the Seybold conference, Barnes and Nobel mentioned that it has reduced the “platforms” it offers to MS Reader and Adobe PDF and eBook formats due to distribution cost considerations.
The conclusion you can draw from our considerable research, evaluation and interviews with industry players is that authors and online publishers need to invest the time and energy into the top platforms for maximum distribution and sales of their e-books.
To learn more about each vendor’s e-book tools, visit their web sites below:
Microsoft Reader
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/default.asp
Palm OS Reader:
http://www.peanutpress.com/makebook/index.cgi
Adobe Acrobat Reader:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
Adobe e-Book Reader:
http://www.adobe.com/products/ebookreader/main.html
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