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Ebook adoption rate beats expectations
We all know that digital books are coming, however recent news seems to indicate that their adoption is happening faster than even we expected.
Part of the reason is the rapid proliferation of the relevant hardware:
Apple sold 7.3m iPads over Christmas, effectively doubling its installed base to 14.5m. They’ve sold 160 million iOS devices in total, including 90 million iPhones.
And Amazon, without giving exact figures, has announced that the Kindle has become the most gifted item in their history, and that customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books on Christmas Day last year.
It’s also increasingly clear that consumers are warming to the idea of digital reading:
While the industry barely blinked at the news that bestselling author Nora Roberts has become the third author to sell over one million ebooks (joining Stieg Larsson and James Patterson in the ‘Kindle Million Club’), the news that Disney had downloads of over one million enhanced ebook apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch to date was more surprising.
Its Toy Story Read-Along app, which has had over 5,000 reviews already, averaging four stars, and been described as ‘the model for how children’s e-books should be done’ is marketed as a ‘fully interactive reading experience packed with Games, Movie Clips, Coloring Pages, Sing-along Tunes, and Surprises on every page’. Children can hear the story read aloud, record their own narration, or explore at their own pace.
Some observers reckon that while print book sales in the US fell 4.4% last year, it was entirely offset by an increase in the sales of ebooks.
So what does this mean for publishers? For one thing, the speed of digital adoption means that if you don’t have a point of view on digital now, you’d better get one soon.
We believe that for the publishing industry to survive (and even thrive), it needs to change its role away from managing the supply of books to bookshops and focus more on consumers and providing them great reading experiences.
To do this, publishers should consider two things:
1. Develop consumer brands and communities – finding writers for your readers rather than readers for your writers (as Seth Godin puts it). Knowing and understanding your readers will be critical in the digital future as readers try to make sense of the infinite choice available to them.
2. Embrace consumer-facing technologies and innovations that converge with other media and content – books also need to integrate into and be relevant with people’s digital lives.
Enhanced Editions co-founder Peter Collingridge will be at this year’s Digital Book World in New York telling you how to do this, talking about the importance of discovery and metadata, and reporting back on the differences between enhancement in the UK and USA, with examples from each. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Twitter or RSS to keep in touch.
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The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ at Christmas
An editorial in the Guardian this morning talked about Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, for which we created the ebook app, calling it the perfect Christmas read and arguing that open-minded Christians will relish Pullman’s take on the nativity story:
In praise of … The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
For moralising monks and parents bankrupted by materialistic children, it is a commonplace at this time of year to bemoan the divorce between the winterval that rules the high street and the real meaning of Christmas. Happily, the book of 2010 provides a gift to reconnect the two. Philip Pullman’s take on the nativity story – which starts with Mary conceiving after an evening visit by an angel who looked “just like one of the young men who spoke to her by the well” – will not appeal to believers of a rigid bent. Nor, for that matter, will his reworking of the entire gospel as a tale of two twins, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, the one a fountain of simple virtue, the other set on building a mighty church on the foundation of “improved” truth. But open-minded Christians will relish it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, hailed a “searching, teasing and ambitious narrative”, which fell short only if measured against the “still more resourceful text” of the gospels he preaches. Pullman retells the great tales of the good book in the pitch-perfect idiom of modern Bible translations, assembling such a persuasive director’s cut from official texts and ancient apocrypha that he had to emblazon “This is a Story” on the back cover to prevent the exercise from getting out of hand. Amid the carols and nativity plays, the human impulse to tell and retell tales is central to the real meaning of Christmas. Regardless of whether Pullman has anything to say about the real Jesus, he has a good deal to say about that.
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