According to The Bookseller, Mark Suchomel, president of the US’ Independent Publishers Group, said at the Independent Publishers Guild conference in London:
“You cannot promote e-books without having the book in print format. There is only one trade reviewer [in the US] requesting e-books.” He also argued because of reviewers’ bandwidth limitations and the possibility of piracy, sending e-books to reviewers was not sensible.
Suchomel argued a “shared” marketing strategy is ideal as print book publicity and marketing drives e-book sales. He said publishers must keep the territory distribution of e and print together. “The publisher markets the content, the consumer decides on the format”.
Really? lol…
We’ve been selling our eBooks for three years now from our website to literally thousands of folks that have long given up buying paper books. At $6.99, the e-version is one-third of the cost and can be emailed as gifts without postage… and get this, when we offered paper books, the cost was so much higher that we sold next to none. We’re not worried in the least, for the eBooks continue to sell and we’ll keep writing more.
As a professional book reviewer, I’ve long received stacks of free paper books each month to peruse and write opinions of, but more and more there are eBooks in lieu of hardcovers… and that’s OK. It is nice to have a paper book in hand, but not at 3 times the cost. And recycled books? They’re even pricier.
BANDWIDTH? I guess I just don’t understand the industry anymore, or maybe never did. An ePub or Amazon Kindle formatted book is so small that a gig or two of ram in an eReader is enough for “thousands” of books.
I doubt sending them in PDF would be TREMENDOUSLY larger, especially if any photos were compressed.
Then again, I never understood typos in eBooks either. I realize they are “converting” them into digital eBook format, but why are they SCANNING them? I’m sure 99% of authors are submitting books to editors electronically, and I’m sure a LOT of those edits are done electronically, so where did OCR come back into play? Formatting might be tricky, but the text should already be digital most of the time, no?
The customer only ‘chooses’ the format if the format they choose is made available to them. Geographical restrictions prevent that from happening for ebook readers.
Strange opinions expressed in this article. Print books are not necessary to market ebooks. And to promote a print book, it would be much easier and affordable to send ebook versions to reviewers. As someone who reviews books upon request sometimes, I always prefer the ebook version. This way I don’t have a book cluttering up my house. The publisher is usually happy to avoid the cost of shipping a printed book. Also it’s easier to review an ebook because I make bookmarks as I read to keep track of ideas or scenes I want to use in the review. Then when I write the review, I go through the bookmarks and can easily find the areas I want to cite. Yes, this can be done with a print book, but paper bookmarks fall out and they aren’t as easy as a push of a button.
I think Mark me need to get out a bit are his reviewers still on dial up. I am on a wireless plan in outback Australia, and managed to download 6 audiobooks and about 5 ebooks this month along with my regular daily browsing – I call bullsh*t on the first point he’s making.
The next thing I take issue with is his opinion of reviewers as potential thieves.
because of reviewers’ bandwidth limitations and the possibility of piracy, sending e-books to reviewers was not sensible.
Piracy? Really? They can’t trust the reviewers not to pirate the books they get, but they’d trust those reviewers’ statements about the quality of the books?
One really does despair about the competence of people at the helm in Publishing when Mr Suchomel feels that these comments will be taken in any way seriously by anyone.
The Bandwidth comment is just stupid. there is no other description. The security comment is also plainly stupid. Corporations across the world, small and large distribute highly confidential documents every day of the week with no problem, yet the Publishers can’t learn to use something like DropBox ?
I am not sure I really understand the comments Mr Suchomel makes about the relationship between paper and e.
Is he really claiming that eBooks cannot be successfully promoted unless there is a paper version in existence first ? I ask because it is so irrational and bizarre. I wish his comments had been more fully quoted or tested when he was being interviewed, to give him the chance to dispel the obvious conclusion about his competence.