Model for sales of e-books

Springer shifts model for sales of e-books - Business - International Herald Tribune: "The strategy of Springer, one of the world's top publishers of scientific, medical and professional literature, is to be as liberal as possible, offering libraries and corporate clients a total of 10,000 titles without any technical restrictions on sharing and usage, the company said.

Meanwhile, Philips, Sony and the Chinese manufacturer Tianjin Jinke Electronics have begun producing new e-book devices, more powerful than earlier readers, with higher storage capacity, clearer screen visibility and battery life that allows as much as 7,500 page turns on a single charge.

Still, demand remains small, with Asians the leading buyers, followed by Americans and then Europeans, in what is by some estimates a $75 million market. That compares with total sales of more than $25 billion in the United States alone, the world's biggest market for books on paper.

Springer claims to be the first to offer all its new titles in e-book form, shifting to a business model of selling books by the copyright year, with a price scale from €94,000, or $119,000, for a small university to €285,000 for a large institution. "