The idea of an electronic book—an eBook—has been around for many years. But it seems like in the last 6-9 months, interest in eBooks has increased significantly. At Tate Publishing, our eBook sales have been the highest they've ever been.
At the risk of sounding like an Apple fan boy (which I am), I really believe the iPad helped kick start this sector of the marketspace. Many devices, including the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader have come before it, but I was never convinced that people were ready to shell out hundreds of dollars for a device that simply let them read books. At least... not yet.
But an iPad—it lets you check your email, watch a movie, log into Facebook... and it lets you read eBooks as well. A device that does all of that makes the $500+ more justifiable. And as more people have grown to enjoy eBooks, it has only helped the sales of Kindles, Nooks and everything else.
As a publisher that helps first-time authors, Tate Publishing works directly with iTunes, Amazon and Barnes & Noble to make sure our books are available for download for the major, popular devices and their respective online stores. It's not good enough to just have your eBook available for download on a website; you need to go to the places people are already looking for digital content.
Although I think we're a long way from eBooks overtaking physical copies sold, the eBook market is large enough that it must be a part of your marketing and distribution plan for your book. Just like music, having a physical CD is not enough—you need to be on iTunes, Amazon and the other major digital music distributors.
1 comments:
I think the future is not going to be so much about e-books overtaking copies sold, as that we are going to see the concept of e-books totally revolutionising the way people engage with books - and that is going to change the way they want to pay for books, share books, and read books.
Paper books compete with each other. E-books compete with blogs, games, emails, facebook, twitter, movies ...
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