Ebooks: Mass Market Publisher Going Digital

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Ebooks: Mass Market Publisher Going Digital

Posted by Zealot on Aug 08, 2010

This post was published 1 year 9 months 16 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

We have been seeing stories lately of authors opting to release certain books only in digital formats…now it seems that trend is spreading to publishers. One of the oldest paperback publishing houses in the US, Dorchester, has opted to go completely digital as of this week. After watching their paperback sales steadily fall in stores such as Walmart, accounting for a 25 percent drop last year alone, Dorchester has decided to radically cut their overhead and focus completely on their digital market.

Dorchester publishes 25 to 30 new titles a month (including one of my favorite recent ebooks, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker by Leanna Renee Hieber) of which more than half are romance novels and much of the rest in the “horror” or “paranormal romance” genres. As romance and horror readers, long stigmatized by "bodice ripper” or “blood and guts” covers, have been some of the first reading communities to fully embrace ebooks, Dorchester’s choice makes good sense for enabling them to best serve their authors and readers and increase their monthly releases.

Here is what Jeffrey Trachtenberg at the WSJ has to say about the move…

"It wasn’t a long, drawn out decision, because we’ve been putting in the effort but not getting the results," said Dorchester Chief Executive John Prebich.

The move comes at a time when electronic-book sales are gaining popularity with readers. Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Co., publishing consultants, predicts that digital books will be 20% to 25% of unit sales by the end of 2012, up from around 8% today.

The decision to go digital could be a sign of things to come for other small publishers facing declining sales in their traditional print business. Dorchester’s switch will likely result in significant savings at a time when it expects its digital sales to double in 2011.

Just as the “Direct to Paperback” and the “Direct to Video/DVD” markets were initially scorned and then slowly gained respect as their profits rose and the choice to avoid costly hardcover or theatrical releases for some titles made sense, I expect we will see more and more Mass market Publishers switching to primarily ebook releases in the coming years.

I think Dorchester and other similar firms should be seen as pioneers and saluted for making business decisions based on cutting overhead and best serving their readers.

Tagged with Dorchester

Zealot (839 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, HP Mini 311, iPod Touch 3G, iPad 16G or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Wil Wheaton!).

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ter watching their paperback sales steadily fall in stores such as Walmart, accounting for a 25 percent drop last year alone, Dorchester has decided to radically cut their overhead and focus completely on their digital market.

[...]

As romance and horror readers, long stigmatized by “bodice ripper” or “blood and guts” covers, have been some of the first reading communities to fully embrace ebooks, Dorchester’s choice makes good sense for enabling them to best serve their authors and readers and increase their monthly releases.

Are they really serving their auhors and readers, though? Going “digital” is kind of ambiguous. Does this mean that they're going to sell eBooks for the Nook and Kindle, sell PDFs that can be read on any computer or what?

If they're targeting devices like the Kindle, and if Walmart shoppers are a big source of their sales, how many Walmart shoppers also have eBook readers? For that matter, what percentage of their current reader base has eBook readers?

If going digital just means publishing digital works that can be read on your PC, I think they'll still lose some readers who don't want to read books on their computer.

Either way, I'm not convinced that they're truly best serving all of their readers. While they're certainly cutting overhead, I would expect sales to drop even more (at least at first). While they probably won't need the same number of sales they would have to make a profit, I suspect there will still be a lot of readers who choose go without Dorchester after the switch because they don't want or can't afford an eBook reader and/or don't want to read eBooks on a PC.

I suppose serving some readers is better than going out of business and serving none, though.

Steve
http://twitter.com/celtxian Steven Dale

I believe this is indeed the future of publishing. As more people get iPads, Kindles and the like (watch out for everyone to jump on the bandwagon now the iPad has shown the way), then more publications will go digital. Also, with Lulu and others gaining more users and self-publishing becoming more popular by the day, its inevitable.

Sure, some books will be published in the traditional way but in my view it will increasingly be the up-market titles that will dominate that market, whilst the majority of titles will come out in digital form only.
http://twitter.com/celtxian Steven Dale

I believe this is indeed the future of publishing. As more people get iPads, Kindles and the like (watch out for everyone to jump on the bandwagon now the iPad has shown the way), then more publications will go digital. Also, with Lulu and others gaining more users and self-publishing becoming more popular by the day, its inevitable.

Sure, some books will be published in the traditional way but in my view it will increasingly be the up-market titles that will dominate that market, whilst the majority of titles will come out in digital form only.

Ebooks: Mass Market Publisher Going Digital

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