“I think ebooks right now are in that same market ghetto as direct to video movies are and direct to paperback books used to be not so long ago.” – ePublishing blog noting the heavy reliance of original e-book publishers on genre fiction, including erotica.
The TeleRead take: Not everyone is so paperbackish. PulpBits, for example, offers not only some genre books but also edgy general fiction and nonfiction. It describes itself as “a mix between a literary zine and a bookshop.”
Until screen quality improves in affordable e-book readers, however, genre publishing will still be the rule among original e-book publishers. Genre fiction, in fact, still rules at my local paperback rack as well. That’s not all. Given the priorities of many big-time publishers, you might say that more than a few hardbacks could be paperbacks instead. With a publishing industry like this, I won’t count on most original e-books going beyond the paperback stage. Perhaps, though, we’ll see more and more exceptions.
Of course, I’m still nostalgic for the days when fifty cents would buy a paperback reprint of a novel by Norman Mailer or Saul Bellow. I’ve already told how I couldn’t even find a Bellow novel in e-form. Sad. And even if I had, it probably would have been wildly overpriced.
Detail: If you count reproductions rather than original e-books–I gave Brad the benefit of the doubt and thought more about originals–then the percentage of genre works declines. In that vein, as Morpheus has noted on MobileRead, the best seller list at a place like the eReader store will consist to a great extent of “reprints.” But then again, keep in mind the long tail effect. Cummulatively, I suspect, genre books account for most of the sales in e-bookdom.
I now buy most of my books in eBook form, and I’d buy all of them as eBooks if all my favorite authors published that way.
I still buy the 2-6 books I’d buy in paperback every week – usually about 1/3 to 1/2 of those in eBook. Genre fiction I buy exclusively in eBook form because it’s so hard to come by in paperback. If the big chains have anything it’s very minimal and often highly overpriced (I presume because of small printing runs).
So from my experience, I buy all my genre fiction but only a portion of my mass market novels in eBook form. That right there might account for a big part of why genre fiction still rules in e-bookdom.
Aym
Thanks for your comment, Aym. I’m curious. What formats do you buy them in? And with or without DRM? – David