e-Book Echo: B&N Now Selling Two Readers in Addition to the Nook
Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. When I interviewed an executive with Barnes & Noble earlier this year his message was clear: they wanted their e-books to work on many different readers, to make it easier for the customer. They are proving they mean that as this week, hot on the heels of the Nook, they started selling another reader through the eReader online store. The JetBook Lite is a budget reader with a 5-inch screen that only sells for $150. That low price gets a bonus of $50 worth of e-books in the form of an in-store credit to get it filled up. This reader uses a non-backlit TFT screen in place of the more traditional e-Ink screen, meaning there is no annoying delay or flash when the page is turned. This screen works in bright sunlight and in low-light situations, and can be rotated to landscape orientation if preferred.
The JetBook joins the eSlick reader from FoxIt that B&N was already selling through its eReader and Fictionwise online stores. The eSlick is a 6-inch reader with an e-Ink screen that works like the Nook and Kindle, and B&N is offering a $100 in-store credit with the purchase of that $259 reader. It is clear they are sticking to their message of getting their content on as many readers as possible.
An e-book summit held recently made an unpopular argument that advertising in e-books is needed to make them financially viable for publishers. The panel claimed that the $9.99 price that Amazon has standardized for Kindle e-books is not enough for publishers to keep getting new content, nor for covering e-book distribution costs. Many who follow the industry don’t buy that this price is insufficient to cover distribution costs for e-books. That cost is much lower than paper books, and it is hard to believe that publishers can’t make money on these digital editions.
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James, today Sunday is the first day of the week soooooo you should be on vacation right? ;) Pretty soon we will see a new E-Reader get released every other week, kind of like the Netbooks when they started coming out. :) This will be good to bring prices down by end of next year.
Just helping Kevin out. :)
PFffffffffffhahahahaha, yeah, right. Wow, how greedy can you get? Apparently increasing the profit margins to insane levels by cutting out the need to actually print anything without increasing the percentage paid to the authors isn’t enough…
Wow. Seriously.
How true is the performance issue with the Nook compared to Kindle?
This is all bluster and positioning on the part of the publishers. Their numbers are about as trustworthy as the music and movie industry when it comes to production costs and margins. They are starting to realise that ebooks are the new market and are trying to position them as the same price as hardcopy. All that is going to happen is more new authors are going to self publish direct to the market, as is happening in the music industry and cut out the publishers. The amount of equipment required is way less than with music.
Until they actual open the books and explain how it costs more I remain extremely sceptical.
If we start with the assumption that you are paying the author the same regardless of the medium (ie a copy is a copy is a copy), and your preproduction costs (editors, researchers, etc) are the same. What are different costs? They stay the same up until the completed, proof read electronic manuscript.
Now with the print version, you have layout, proofs, relayout, printing, binding, warehousing, shipping, and returns of unsold books, as you only get paid on books that are sold.
With ebooks, you have minor layout, using near automated tools to your desired format (PDF, ePub, Mobi, etc). At that point you either transfer the ebook to the retailer and collect monthly cheques, or pay for an e-commerce site and sell it yourself. With most ebooks, you already have a print ready copy, since you did a print run, and the ebook costs are even lower, making them a value add option.
There is no way that the second option costs more, or even the same. If the publisher can afford to sell paperback books they can make money on ebooks. Period! If they want to make the same amount of money as they do on their print versions, the ebooks would be noticeably cheaper. Last time I checked most paperbacks at Amazon were not $9.99.
Look at Baen’s model. With websubscription you can get approximately 5 books for $15, or an a la carte pricing of $6. They even came up with the brilliant idea of offering advanced copies for diehard fans for $15. They make there ebooks available at the same time as the hard copy and don’t seem to be having any issues.
Actually, B&N is selling at least three ebook readers besides nook. You’re missing the eBookwise-1150 (http://www.ebookwise.com/ebookwise/ebookwise1150.htm), which is ancient (“latest” version of the old Gemstar Rocketbook, this version I think was introduced around 2004) but cheap. Hardware generally even more obsolete than the JetBook Lite, but at least it has a backlit LCD screen, the JetBook Lite is a non-backlit LCD. None of these three ebook readers are new nor are particularly hardware competitive with the nook, but they are cheaper.
I went poking and found this Ebook publisher: E-Reads (http://www.ereads.com/). There’s some great posts in the blog:
* A discussion of Covey and Random House from an ebook publisher’s point of view (http://www.ereads.com/2009/12/separation-of-e-book-rights-publishers.html)
Specifically interesting to me: contracts started including ebook specific language around 1990, earlier contracts had ambiguous language that could cover ebooks, which is why Covey’s decision is an important event.
* A chart of ebook publisher gross sales (http://www.ereads.com/2009/12/october-e-book-sales-bust-one-month.html)
Ebook publisher gross sales were over $45 million in Q3 2009. Sales started growing very fast starting Q1 2008, compare to Kindle introduction in November 2007 (which sold out in about 6 hours and new units weren’t available in significant quantities until April 2008). Sales in October 2009 were almost 4 times October 2008. Still a small part of the market, but it looks like ebooks have left infancy.