Publishers and industry analysts think electronic books will be the next big thing, but the rest of us aren’t so sure.
What contraption will we use to read them? What’s going to encourage us to start doing this? And how much will we be willing to pay?
In the past several months, a host of big names have announced plans for e-books. Time Warner Books, Simon & Schuster and Random House are offering titles. In August, Microsoft offered a new e-book reading program as a free download, and RCA will soon bring out a new generation of stand-alone e-book devices said to be a significant improvement over current models.
In a study paid for by American publishers, Andersen Consulting predicted that in five years e-books will account for $2.3 billion in annual sales, about 10 percent of the book publishing market.
“This market is inevitable,” says Claire Zion, editorial director of Time Warner’s iPublish.com. “It’s not a question of if, but when.”
One problem is the current devices.
“They cost a lot,” says Dan O’Brien of Forrester Research, a Massachusetts firm specializing in tech subjects. “Their display isn’t that sharp, and there isn’t a big reading screen.”
Prices for e-readers range from $199 to $600. Then you have to buy content, which is not cheap either.
The few popular books that are available electronically can cost as much as the paper versions or more. Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation,” for example, goes for $19.96 in its e-book version at BarnesandNoble.com, compared with $14.97 for the hardcover version.
Publishers say they have a lot of start-up costs they need to earn back, but experts point out that by eliminating paper, printing, binding and shipping, publishers already are saving huge amounts.
Paul Hilts, Publishers Weekly’s technology editor, believes e-book pricing is a subtle indication that publishers aren’t embracing the technology as much as they claim.
After all, says Hilts, they jumped on the e-bandwagon only last March, after a Stephen King e-story, “Riding the Bullet,” was downloaded 600,000 times from the Web. “Within 48 hours, every publisher was telling staff: `You’ve got to get me a business plan to get me some of those sales.”‘
The bloom is already off the electronic rose for King, however. In September he said he is reconsidering the whole business because only 75,000 people paid the requested $1 for Part 2 of his new novel “The Plant,” way down from the 171,000 folks who paid a buck for Part 1. Payment is on the honor system.
The lack of content appears to be changing. Several major publishing houses have announced they will sell their top offerings in e-format. Several also are working on electronic versions of backlists. Simon & Schuster, for one, has announced that it will sell e-books of the 19 novels of best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark.
Generally, e-book sales have been small. Publishers Weekly estimates there are only 20,000 e-readers, and an industry spokesman says that most e-books sell no more than a few hundred copies.
BarnesandNoble.com reports the site’s best-selling e-book is a “Star Trek” original, which costs $1. The top e-titles tend to be in science fiction, business and technology, which experts expected.
“What’s doing surprisingly well is romance,” says Michael Fragnito, B&N’s vice president for e-books. Romance fans, it turns out, love the Net, congregating in chat rooms to talk about their favorite authors, and they easily migrate to sites to purchase electronic downloads.
While Amazon.com is still developing an e-book strategy, BarnesandNoble.com has an e-book button prominently displayed on its home page and has moved aggressively into the field.
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“We definitely believe that it’s going to be a big part of the marketplace in the future,” says Fragnito, “and we’re placing our bets there.”
The other big bets have been placed by Gemstar TV Guide, which has paid $400 million to acquire Softbook and Rocket, the two main producers of e-readers.
Gemstar has licensed its technologies to RCA, which this winter will come out with two devices that it will mass market through stores such as Circuit City and Best Buy.
One device, the RCA REB1100, has a 5.5-inch (diagonally measured) monochrome screen with six times the resolution of typical Palm devices. It has space to store 20 novels and weighs a pound.
More upscale is the REB1200, with an 8.5-inch screen and 12 times the resolution of a Palm. It weighs 2 pounds and can store about twice as much as the 1100.
RCA planned to introduce the models to the public at a New York book fair in September, but that was changed.
“There are a lot of odds and ends that need to be wrapped up on this,” says James Harper of RCA.
The biggest one is pricing. The company still hasn’t figured out what to do about that.
Another problem is warring formats. The battle is primarily between Adobe Acrobat systems and the Open E-Book standard, which uses common HTML and XML Web programming.
Acrobat is used primarily by Glassbook, a small company that Adobe recently bought. OEB is just coming into its own, championed by Microsoft, which produced a reader in August that can be used on computers and laptops. The RCA readers use OEB.
Both systems are working hard to combat the piracy that has plagued digital music. Adobe has controls that can make it easy to print but inhibit storing to a hard drive or being copied. Microsoft has gone the other way: You can store material, but you can’t print it.
Since both formats are free downloads and since publishers are putting out content in both, the programming differences don’t bother most industry leaders.
What’s more important, says Zion of iPublish.com, is that “two things have to happen for this market to take off. The devices have to get better and cheaper, and the quality of the content has to get better.”