E-book novices can be put off by the hassles of installing e-book software and dealing with DRM and the Tower of eBabel, all those clashing e-book formats.
Wouldn’t it be great, then, if, at no extra charge, an e-store could offer browsing rights to books along with the usual e-book files in Adobe, Mobipocket and so on? That is exactly what eBooks.com is doing through the new eb20 book viewer that I mentioned some weeks ago. eb20 is available for the overwhelming majority of eBooks.com’s more than 100,000 titles, according to Stephen Cole, the managing director and founder, interviewed by e-mail.
“22 percent more likely to come back”
Just what are the sales stats for “people whose first experience with eBooks.com is to buy” books in eb20? According to Stephen, they “are 22 percent more likely to come back and, when they do come back, come back 8 days sooner and spend 20 percent more.”
Might eb20 be an important weapon for indie e-bookstores in their battles with the Kindle? Needless to say, I’m also eager to hear from other stores and tech providers to see what they have up their sleeves, beyond, of course, discounts. Stephen is competing in another way, through eb20’s improved buying experience, and I suspect that Amazon will be looking at him very closely if Jeff B and friends are not doing so already. While eb20 isn’t yet finished, it is, as noted, available to Stephen’s customers now. For me at least, eb20 already provides a better book-viewing experience than Amazon’s equivalent software. Yes, if Amazon has countermeasures, I’d love to tell TeleBlog readers about them, too. Hello, Amazon? Speak up!
Dymocks and Cambridge U. Press among users
Companies ranging from the Dymocks bookstore chain in Australia to Cambridge University Press, Stephen says, will be using the new technology, which is also useful for previews of material. Follow the just-given links to see press releases (ignore the “download option,” which I lack time to edit out right now).
So why eb20 is of interest to me as a reader? No onscreen system is as nice as scrolling through a book in Mobipocket or whatever, but this system in many ways comes tantalizingly close. You can search, take notes, do some printing and copying, and even use the mouse wheel to scroll through books (feature request list: wheel-triggered page changing).
On the way will be the option of changing font sizes and, eventually, read-aloud capabilities. Let’s hope that style-changing options come as well, although the present Times look is highly readable.
Helpfully, too, it’s a snap to be able to see only the text of the book on the screen without anything else to distract you. Click on the graphic to the left if you want a better view of the full-screen mode in action.
I just wish eBooks.com would use a plain English term rather than “Immersive reading mode”; this mean you can Baptize the books you buy?
Yes, I can think of other interface-related improvements, too, but all in all, this is a rather impressive system.
Here’s an edited Q & A between Stephen and me, with the order of the questions changed for coherence and some material added from prior correspondence.
No PDF involved, huh? Just purely Ajax based? EB20 is truly an eBook.com original? And why the name EB20?
We can create an eb20 ebook from any format that’s delivered to us, programmatically. So, yes some PDFs are involved in the creation process, but we can really do it using anything. eb20 was created 100% by our Aussie development guys. Sadly, eb20 means “Ebooks 2.0,” but that’s already such a dated concept that I wish I could shift the blame to someone other than me. No one in the company could come up with a catchy new name and we were running out of time, so I gave it that. We’re thinking of running a contest on eBooks.com to see if our users can think of something better.
The reader was built in-house–it doesn’t require Flash or any other download or plugin. Which is important in some corporate or institutional networks. What prompted us to develop eb20 was the generally irritating process experienced by people who try to download a DRM’d ebook file. What we’re trying to do is to patch together an acceptable user experience from the inadequate pieces of reader technology that are available now.
We didn’t do an announcement for eb20. Just let it quietly out of the bag about 6 months ago. It took us a long time to get the conversion process smoothed out, so we didn’t want to be shouting from the rooftops about an app that still had some bugs. It’s all fine now.
How much does it cost to set up EB20? Can a publisher or store do it in house or does it run on your server? Cost per title? Formats you can convert from?
For a publisher or a retailer, there is a substantial setup cost, and then ongoing fees. The reader and eb20 e-books are all served from our own servers. We don’t charge per title. We can (as above) convert from almost any machine readable format.
Our partners like EB 20 because, despite the “substantial” setup fees, the cost of partnering with us is trivial compared with trying to build a thing like this from scratch. And, for a publisher or retailer, there’s zero technology risk.
For most of the publishers we work with, our agreement enables us to change the business model without consultation, simply by notifying them, but they always retain the right to pull their titles at a moment’s notice. So, we formally advised all our publishers that their books will be available to end users to both download and read online.
Do you think your background as an old-fashioned P bookseller was helpful in getting publishers to agree to let you use your system? Somehow I wonder if a brand-new startup could have done what you did.
I think there’s definitely some truth in that. Having a background in the book trade certainly helps us to understand the needs and concerns of publishers. And also having been round the traps for ten years now, pushing this digital barrow, most of our publishers know that we’re competent and can be trusted with their core assets. (Touching wood.)
There was an immediate consensus among publishers that this was a good idea, and indeed the stats show it to be so. Some publishers require formal approval first, which we sought and in most cases received. A couple of trade publishers were quite wary to start with, but most publishers are on board now. One publisher, incredibly, wanted us to charge customers more for this, but we declined.
What about benefits to you and the publishers?
The proof of the pudding is in the stats:
For people whose first experience with eBooks.com is to buy a book (or books) available in eb20 format, they
– are 22 percent More Likely To Come Back and, when they do come back,
– come Back 8 Days Sooner and
– spend 20 percent More
…than those people whose first experience with eBooks.com is to buy books that are only available to download.
These stats suggest that our users find the experience significantly better when they have the option of reading online within seconds of buying an ebook. The outcome is that we’re writing much bigger quarterly checks to publishers.
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