Electronic publishing holds the promise of someday making almost any book available to any reader, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year ... at a fraction of the price of a printed book. In addition, there are no meaningful costs for printing, shipping, or warehousing e-Books, and no unsold or returned copies. These advantages are virtually irresistible to many authors and publishers.
Most publishing industry observers agree that electronic books will be a major factor in the future. However, it appears that the full potential of e-publishing still lies ahead...
Prior to 2000, a wide variety of web sites appeared, offering various forms of electronic books, ranging from public domain classics available for free downloading from Project Gutenberg, to commercial sites that offered new books (good and bad) in electronic form for a fee.
While most early e-Books were crudely formatted, and often released without professional editing, typesetting or other features provided by major publishers, they gained a good deal of attention from the media and the public.
In March 2000, Stephen King's Riding the Bullet was released as an e-Book and sold more than 400,000 copies within 48 hours.
At the time, it seemed as if e-Books had suddenly come of age, but subsequent developments proved disappointing. Pirated copies of King's e-Book began to surface on the Internet within 48 hours.
Later in 2001, important lawsuits involving downloadable music and online publishing, such as the Napster case, Random House v. Rosetta Books and New York Times v. Tasini, raised new questions about electronic rights.
U-Publish.com co-author Danny O. Snow published an e-Rights Update summarizing the copyright issues in The Independent, the national publication of the Publishers Marketing Association, during October 2001. He argued that legal issues were not as grave as reported elsewhere, but that publishers needed to change their business models instead.
Although copyright questions are important, the real issue about the early market for e-Books was more basic: consumers were simply not yet buying e-Books, or devices for reading them, in significant quantities.
From the beginning, e-Books have been closely aligned with independent publishing. But early efforts to bring e-Books more squarely into mainstream markets simply did not meet initial expectations.
According to Steven Zeitchik, a reporter for Publishers Weekly (12/10/2001) "Trade publishing's most elaborate experiment in e-publishing came to an end last week when Time Warner Trade Publishing announced it is folding iPublish..."
Edward Nawotka of PW wrote on 12/17/2001 that "MightyWords.com, which created quite a bit of fanfare when it launched in March 2000 with plans to digitally distribute original short works, is closing down."
These developments left fewer options for writers who wanted to publish independently in electronic form. Sadly, many of the remaining e-Book sites were little more than online vanity presses, that would release almost anything, usually at the author's expense.
In 2002, Random House and RosettaBooks.com settled their controversial lawsuit over e-rights out-of-court. This left unanswered questions about legal issues that many e-publishing enthusiasts had hoped to see resolved.
U-Publish.com co-author Dan Snow also published a new book titled Steal this e-Book! in 2002, a collection of articles and letters that traced the history of e-Books since 1999, with additional commentary from Dan Poynter and other experts. It is available in both electronic and paperback form. It discusses reasons why major media companies failed in their early efforts to bring e-Books into the mainstream of the book industry, but concludes that the inherent power of e-publishing remains strong.
In 2003, retail e-Book sales for the first three quarters (Jan-Sept) surpassed 1 million for the first time, according to data released by the Open e-Book Forum, the e-Book industry trade and standards organization, now called IDPF.
Also in 2003, the Cleveland Public Library opened the first circulating e-Book collection. In 2004, a growing number of other libraries followed. e-Books are perfect for libraries, where patrons are able to access books and periodicals without leaving home, without paying late fees, or finding that something they want to read is unavailable when it is checked out by another reader.
In late 2004, Google announced plans to make books widely available to libraries in digital form.Poynter and Snow remain confident that e-Books will play an increasingly important role in the future of publishing. Meanwhile, the best strategy for authors and publishers is probably to look for a combination of features that provide the economic advantages of e-publishing with a printed product that readers want today. POD books are a good examples, and most POD books can convert readily to digital formats for electronic distribution.
This approach allows authors and publishers to tap the markets that are truly viable today, while positioning themselves to take advantage of technologies and markets that will mature in the years ahead.
