E-books the final frontier

The biggest question publishers are asking themselves these days is probably "what should we do about e-books?"

They are such a new concept that no one is really sure how to handle them or how the general public will eventually will want to use them.  So because of this any experiments that are played out are quite interesting.

Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher) recently wrote a book, Sunken Treasure, which he publishes himself though Lulu and was trying to decide if he should produce an e-book....  Here is a transcript from his blog explaining his thought process and what happened... 

"At 1:38pm, I sent the following message to Twitter: "Hey Twitterverse: how would you feel about a digital version of Sunken Treasure for about $5?"

I expected that a dozen or so people would be interested, but I hoped for more. Within ten minutes, over 100 different people said they were not only interested, but wanted it RIGHT NOW PLZ KTHX.

"Wow," I thought. "That was a more positive and emphatic response than I was expecting!"

I told Twitter: "Wow, so it appears that quite a lot of you want PDF versions of this book for $5. I didn't think it would be so many, honestly. Hmmm..."

Responses continued to pour in. I started making hash marks on a note pad.

A lot of people were asking about Kindle versions, Sony eReader versions, and other versions. I made a lot more hash marks on my note pad, and noticed that the page was almost filled.

I looked around the Lulu publishing options and told Twitter: "Many questions about other formats for digital versions of my books. Short answer: all I can do at the moment on my own is PDF. Still want?"

Short answer: Yes. A whole lot of people wanted it, even if it was in a PDF format.

I've always wanted to do digital versions of my books, but I've never had a way to do it that doesn't involve me manually accepting payments and sending out links or something equally complicated. My POD experience with Lulu has completely changed that. I logged into my Lulu account, clicked a couple of buttons, filled in one box with $5.00, and I was done.

I took a deep breath and told Twitter: "Okay, Twitterverse! You asked for it, so here it is. Sunken Treasure in DRM-free PDF for $5: http://tinyurl.com/sunkenpdf"

I admit that I had a brief flash of doubt. "Did I just screw myself? Did I just sell one and end up giving away a hundred?"

"No," I reminded myself. "People who will steal from me were never going to support my work, anyway. You're doing the right thing. You're making it available to people at a really fair price, in a super portable format. And maybe people will like it and want a paper copy for themselves or to give as gifts."

I hoped that PDF sales would be solid ... well, they were solid, for about ten minutes, and then they exploded. In less than an hour, the total PDFs sold exceed 1/5 of the total print copies sold. People were e-mailing positive feedback, people were Twittering positive feedback, and people were starting to talk about it on their blogs.

"Okay, this is awesome," I thought. "I definitely did the right thing."

Over the next 24 hours, I checked sales every hour or so (hey, can you blame me?) and I watched total PDF sales close the gap with print sales, but something really awesome was also happening: the print sales, which had slowed to about 2 a day a month after release, suddenly picked up! It wasn't a ton, and I'm still not getting rich off of this effort, but it was still pretty remarkable. Feedback from buyers suggested that a lot of people read the PDF, liked it, and wanted a physical copy of their own as a result. Any doubts I had about the demand for this format, or the wisdom of trusting my instincts and releasing a DRM-free PDF at a reasonable price point vanished. I started thinking about other work of mine, and how cool it would be to offer digital versions in a similar manner."

I think this experiemnt is a good look into the future considering that many of his followers (and fans) may be Science (Fiction) lovers, who are notorious as early adopters of technology.   

What I peronally take from this, so find a large salt grain, is that we are still a few years away from e-books proliferating the way mp3s have done but as the kinks are worked out of portable reading devices they will be well on their way.  If we were to track e-books on the mp3 time line I think we would be at about 1996 perhaps... when mp3s were just comming out but the internet had not yet adapted to high speed connections, napster was still three years away and hardrives were still hovering on or below the one gig mark.

However once these issues are fully addressed publishing will need to have worked out their price points, benefits of a paper copy, and DRM restrictions or they will have a fight similar to the music industry.

Comments

[Sylvia]

Just goes to show that people know they are being overcharged for media (whether print or music). It boggles my mind why publishers don't lower their prices so they can sell more legal copies. This is especially true of intangible electronic media. Electrons just aren't worth that much. Publishers seem trapped in the vicious cycle of shrinking sales leading to higher prices leading to shrinking sales. They only way out is to make media cheap enough that people will not think twice before hitting the Buy button. I'd happily pay ten cents for an mp3 file or a couple bucks for an ebook, but at the current prices I have not and will not buy any.