Like most publishers’ ebook expectations in this deflated era of digital publishing, Seven Stories Press had fairly unspectacular ones. They dutifully digitized their files. They hung out their e-shingle. They even wrangled a way to sell ebooks directly from their site. And the results trickled in. “Tiny” is the word one executive used. Even Noam Chomsky’s 9-11, which spent seven weeks on the New York Times extended bestseller list and has 300,000 copies in print, racked up only “a few hundred” ebook sales. Then, with the aid of Paris-based content management partner GiantChair, they converted some ebooks to the Palm Reader format, selling them on the Palm Digital Media site. And a lightbulb popped on. “As soon as we started putting books that had not been in Palm format on their site, we started seeing two digits added to our checks,” says Cory McCloud, GiantChair’s CEO. It was a “rather thrilling surge of ebook sales,” confirms Lars Reilly, Systems Manager at Seven Stories. “Palm Digital Media does a tremendous amount of business and we’re starting to see our type of titles included in that.”
Ebooks may still represent a drop in the bucket for the publishing industry, but it’s hard not to gawk at Seven Stories’ minor triumph. Ebooks? Thrilling? Just ask Mike Segroves, Director of Business Development for the Palm Digital Media Group, who says Palm currently sells 1,000 books every day, a figure that’s growing steadily. “If we continue the rest of the month at the same pace we’re going,” he says, “we’ll have a 19% increase over last month, and a 30% increase over July of last year.” Segroves figures that about 60% of all ebooks sold are in the Palm Reader format, which has a library of 10,500 titles, with 100 new books added every week. And readers tend to be rabid. A random sampling of three customers from his sales log the other day, Segroves says, turned up one who had purchased 178 books; one who had purchased about 50; and one who was a first-time buyer. “We’re very pleased with the rate our business is growing,” he says, noting that the company recently launched German and French editions of its ebooks, licensing technology to Internet retailers in those countries (pdassi.de in Germany; GiantChair in France). Partners are now being sought for similar operations in Italy, Spain, and Scandinavia, and Palm is also active in the UK, since WH Smith offers Palm ebooks.
At very least, say admirers, Palm wins the cachet award. “I like to see Palm as the iTunes of the ebook industry,” McCloud says. “You’ve got all these other bozos out there making life difficult. Adobe and Microsoft are barking up these complicated DRM trees that are just making the user run away from the whole experience as fast as they can.” Microsoft, as one might imagine, is conceding turf to nobody. “All of our publishing partners are reporting substantial growth in eBook sales — most of them double-digit growth over the past year,” Group Product Manager of eReading Cliff Guren said in a statement. To prod readers over to its fold, last month Microsoft launched a 20-week summer promotion of free downloads, offering up 60 fiction, nonfiction, and reference ebooks. (The catch: only three titles per week are available, and you can’t access previously offered titles.)
Among other publishers, cautious optimism rules the day. “The ebook market is a very, very small market,” says Kate Tentler, Publisher of Simon & Schuster Online. “But its growth is exponential. From month to month it can be anywhere from 50% to 70% growth over the previous year. We’re pleased with the places we’re seeing certain traction in terms of ebooks” — those being sci-fi, romance, and the big bestsellers. S&S sells ebooks directly in the Adobe, Microsoft, and Palm formats from its SimonSaysShop site, though Tentler sees no major consumer preference among the three formats. Her feeling is that further format winnowing will ensue before consumers curl up with ebooks as they do their iPods. Though Gemstar will be missed, she says: “When there are so many formats available, it dilutes the process for the consumer.”
Over at HarperCollins, executives are bullish about the PerfectBound ebook imprint, which has published more than 400 titles, with a record 300 expected this year. “We’re very pleased with the progress of our PerfectBound imprint, specifically the fact that it is publishing and not just digitizing,” says David Steinberger, President of Corporate Strategy and International for HarperCollins. “It’s a focused list. We provide editorial support and publicity support for many of these titles. And we publish on a global English basis in many cases.” Steinberger points out that the ebook program is knitted into a number of other new Internet strategies that are geared to the core mission of serving authors. Those include the “extremely successful” AuthorTracker service, which updates readers by email when their favorite authors publish new titles or go on tour — “We have over 3,000 authors and we have sign-ups for every one of them,” Steinberger says — and the Invite the Author service, in which authors are made available each month to participate in reading group sessions via telephone (newly invited authors include Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Safran Foer). About a dozen authors have participated so far, according to Ardy Khazaei, recently promoted to SVP Electronic Media. Harper has also been syndicating content to more than a dozen non-book sites such as those for Fox network affiliates, which post Harper’s author interviews, chapter excerpts, and other book features.
Moving the P-Book Needle
That’s just the sort of Internet strategy some feel can actually move the sales needle — whether for ebooks or plain old printed matter. “Everyone is selling the bookstores,” says Carol Fitzgerald, President of The Book Report Network. “You really need to sell the readers.” Fitzgerald has been working with HarperCollins on a teen project, where 20 advance reader copies are made available in an “advertorial” on her teenreads.com site, and distributed to teens who request them. (Those readers are then invited to submit 50-word reviews of the title, which are devoured by the HarperTempest editorial team.) The program works, says Fitzgerald, because the site reaches its precise target market. “We have 57,000 teen readers,” she says. “They’re not coming here for makeup tips. They’re coming here to read.” Meanwhile, next month Fitzgerald is set to launch FaithfulReader.com, a site for Christian readers, and is currently seeking sponsorship from Christian publishers. So does it all pay off? “Our sales were up in the first quarter with Amazon,” she says. “We were up double digits. Our traffic was up so significantly, we had over half a million unique visitors coming to our websites in April alone. Publishing is in such rough shape right now, if people were doing more with the Web, I think they’d be faring much better.”
