The Influence Of E-Books On The Publishing Market

The world of book publishing is about to undergo a massive upheaval – as a result of the rapid growth in the popularity of both e-book readers and e-books. Driven by the growing popularity of e-book readers – like the Amazon Kindle for instance – e-books have rapidly been accepted by the general public. It would be very easy to consider them as no more than another way of delivering written content. However, they may prove to be the most significant change to reading since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Perhaps that sounds a little melodramatic – but the fact is that e-books totally change the long established publishing cycle. In general, publishers release hardback editions followed, normally a few months to a year later, by the paperback version. Obviously there is no reason why the e-book edition wouldn’t be published at the same time as the hardback.

Obviously, because e-books don’t use any paper, chemicals or bindings, and because they don’t need to be shipped, they cost a lot less than a printed book. What this means is that the e-book version could be made available at a reduced price concurrently with the hardback book. That could have a serious impact on the profits of the big publishing houses – especially if you consider that the people who own e-book readers are likely to be fairly heavy readers.

Some fairly heated discussions have already taken place between Amazon – who planned to price all e-books at $ 9.99 or less – and the major publishing houses. For a brief period, books by McMillan were removed from Amazon’s website. Whilst things have quietened down a little for the – it appears highly probable that e-book prices will fall further in future.

However, there are clearly some very positive aspects for the major publishing houses. Clearly they will have smaller costs when selling e-books, so they should be able to make a profit. Alternative strategies for marketing books will also become available to them.

The Amazon collection of Kindle books is the most extensive available on the web at this time. They have more than 700,000 titles to choose from – and there are a further 1.8 million out of copyright books which are available as free download from the Amazon Kindle store. Most of these were published before 1923, but there are other examples of modern books which can be downloaded at no cost.

You can often see publishers offering modern, sometimes recently published, books for free. Sometimes this is done for a short period. It allows them to showcase a new title or author and the increased number of downloads will help the book to move up the best sellers list. Once it has reached a decent level, the publishers can charge for it and benefit from its boosted ranking. You may also find the first book in a series being made available for free. Obviously the idea is that readers will go on to buy further titles in the series – assuming that they enjoy the opening volume.

Of course, both of these techniques could have been used with printed books. However, it would cost a lot more money, and therefore be a much riskier undertaking. It seems clear that e-books are here to stay. No doubt there will be some publishing firms who will attempt to safeguard their profits using somewhat restrictive techniques. It will be the ones that are best able to adapt to the new digital publishing landscape by offering value to both authors and readers who survive.