Hold onto your hats, folks. We have raw data on the Australian digital book industry. Yes – actual data. Which really means we have data on Borders.
Locally, Borders are the only ebookseller that has made decent progress in collecting “the full set”. That is, signing contracts with every major of Australian publisher to sell their ebooks.
The fact that we are nearing the end of 2010 and no-one has cracked this yetis distressing. But we’ll ignore that whine for now.
In talking with harassing REDgroup Retail head of publicity Malcolm Neil, I’ve weasled some data out of him about how many titles their Borders-Whitcoulls sites are uploading, and how they are going in chasing that coveted full set.
The short answer: uploading lots of books, achingly close to signing the last publisher. At the Borders-Kobo Sydney launch in May, figures like 2 million titles were being bandied about, but the number of paid ebook titles was more like 50,000. The rest were out-of-copyright and fringe titles.Fifty thousand mainstream books seemed low at the time, but it was a start. REDgroup was promising to double or triple that within weeks.
So how have they gone? I think it’s fair to say it hasn’t all been plain sailing. When singing up a publisher, step one is inking the deal, step two is getting their ebooks – in a state fit to release. Says Neil, “Being first to do this on a large scale, you find yourself stuck in the boring world of metadata. Signing the deals is one thing – then you’ve got to make sure the ebooks are up to scratch. All the tags and metadata have to be fixed and checked against the standards. There’s also a nervousness in putting ebooks out. With print books you can look at the proof before you send it out, but ebooks are more of an unknown quantity.”
Know as vigorous deal negotiators within the local book industry, REDgroup have clearly found local publishers willing to push back just as hard in contract negotiations. It’s a free country, and a free-ish market after all. But they’re relatively happy with the progress they’ve made.
Neil says that Borders is adding around 2500 titles in an average week, “with around 25 per cent being what I would call solid mainstream titles, the rest being older archive titles or Smashwords.” And he’s provided a spreadsheet of a typical week, just to prove he isn’t fibbing. It shows 2098 titles uploaded in what looks like about a six-and-a-half day period.
“At the start of each month we get new titles from all the majors so in the first week there’s about 4-5000 titles of which about 2000 are new,” he says. Then it seems the pace falls away for the rest of the month. Then there are heavier periods, continues Neil, “When new publishers come on stream there is also a spike, particularly with the overseas ones. For example … when we went live with Mills and Boon and Harlequin that was around 800-900 titles with monthly new titles of around 100. Romance readers should be happy.
“The local Australian publishers are also coming in dribs and drabs. However Whitcoulls is much slower on their local content.”
Yes – about that. What about the full set in Australia? News is that there’s only one to go – and it’s a biggie – Hachette. “And I understand Kobo are very close to signing them,” says Neil.
So what’s Borders paid title count at now? “Paid ebook number stand well over 200,000 mainstream ebook titles on Borders.com.au – same on Whitcoulls,” says Neil.
Let’s hope the next milestone is ubiquity.
Via Book Bee
