E-books spur sales

The end user: E-books spur sales: By Mark J. McGarry International Herald Tribune : "For every breathless proclamation of some exciting advance in the world of e-books, there seems to be a more sober announcement of some setback.

With much fanfare, Barnesandnoble.com started selling e-books in 2000, but it pulled the plug in 2003 in the face of low sales. The celebrated Rocket eBook fell to earth the same year. A handful of e-book sites, including Fictionwise and eReader, have been in business for years and offer hundreds or even thousands of titles. Other operations spring up, sputter along for a time, then quietly fold.

But the biggest names in both technology (Microsoft, Adobe) and traditional publishing (Random House, Time Warner) remain heavily involved in the field. They just are not making much money.

In the third quarter of 2004, according to the International Digital Publishers Forum, sales of e-books jumped 25 percent from the year before - to a paltry $3.2 million, divided among 23 publishers.

If e-books remain a dubious proposition for publishers, it may be because they are not compelling to readers. Take "The Da Vinci Code." Amazon sells the hardcover version for $14.97 and the e-book for $10.17, a saving of just $4.80. Perhaps most important, you can easily pass the hardcover along to a neighbor who hasn't read it (if you can find one), but thanks to digital rights management, you can't loan your e-book to anyone.

Some authors have concluded that the best way to make money through e-books is to give them away. Michael Palin, the former member of the Monty Python troupe who is now a famed travel writer, has six of his books online at www.palinstravels.co.uk. James Randi's "Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural" just went up at www.randi.org. Baen Books, a successful publisher of science fiction in hardcover and paperback, offers 40 titles for free download.

Cory Doctorow, European affairs director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group working to protect citizens' digital rights, has just had his new novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," published in hardcover by Tor Books for $24.95. But Doctorow has also made the novel available for free download. He gave away his first novel, too, with a half-million copies of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" downloaded.

The idea is not to give away e-books instead of selling what Doctorow calls "treeware." The aim is to generate buzz that will promote sales of hardcovers and paperbacks - either the book offered for download, or the author's other books.

On his Web site, Doctorow says his writing income has doubled every year for the past five years, with "Down and Out" going through five printings in 18 months.

Charles Stross, a writer who lives in Edinburgh, has made his new novel, "Accelerando," available for download at www.accelerando.org. In the first 30 days, 56,000 copies were downloaded. Stross doesn't have sales figures for "Accelerando" yet but says the e-book has fueled sales of the hardcover, published by Ace Books in the United States and by Orbit in Britain.

"What I can safely say is that in its first month on sale, the hardcover edition of 'Accelerando' peaked twice as high in Amazon's sales ranking as any of my previous books," Stross said.

Another of his books was published in hardcover at the same time, but there was no free e-book of "The Hidden Family," and it seems to have made a difference. "'Accelerando' appears to have handily outsold it," Stross said.

But the immediate impact on sales is a secondary concern. And, since Doctorow's and Stross's e-books can be freely copied, piracy is not a concern at all.

"I'm a mid-list author. My biggest enemy is not piracy," Stross said, "but obscurity. Anything I can do to get my name in front of readers is an investment in the future."

"It's no different from making sure my book appears in every public library in the land. Authors gain little direct benefit from library lending, but library lending builds an author's profile and, ultimately, their direct sales to readers. It's marketing, pure and simple.""