FutureBook

E-book sales in The Netherlands passed the 600,000 mark over the first half of 2012, with close to 16,000 available titles. E-book revenue constitutes 3% of the market, against 1,6% over 2011 and 0,7% over 2010.

The Dutch e-book market is predicted to reach 5-7% at the end of this year. This means the growth of both sales and the number of available titles is now clearly accelerating. Read more »

One of the advantages of switching from general trade publishing to SMT is that I get to see a whole new side of the publishing world. One of the areas that has caught my specific interest is students. This is, I feel, one of the more interesting groups for publishers to target: they are young, tech savvy, not rich yet and very engaged online. Read more »

This week, the news came out that libraries and publishers have agreed to disagree on e-book lending. This will finally clear the way for a fast development of e-book lending in The Netherlands. Read more »

One thing became apparent during the Futurebook Conference rather quickly: it has become painfully clear that publishers should be looking at the consumers as their main customers, in stead of retailers. The erosion of the retail-based model of the book universe has been going on for some years, fuelled by the online retail revolution and the changing consumer behavior that came with it. Digital publishing has only further hastened the process. Read more »

I sat listening to all the stories at the Tools of Change Conference in Frankfurt with mixed emotions. All is well with the digital book, in sharp contrast with the sad and ever declining figures of the general trade book market, according to the figures released by Nielsen at the conference: 5,6% down this year in the US, 6,1% in the UK, 4,5% in my home country The Netherlands, 2,3% in Spain. Only Italy escapes the trend and seems to be going through a Renaissance with a small growth of 0,2% after growing 2,6% last year. Read more »

Lately,  I have been thinking about e-book pricing – and I’m sure I am not the only one. The reason for this was an old news item I read about Amazon and Random House announcing plans for a “pay per page” service on their respective websites. Read more »

The 4th Editech Conference in Milan, held on June 9th, was mostly about the fragmented nature of the European digital market. That was not unexpected – the majority of the audience was Italian, and the Italian e-book market is among the smallest in Europe, small enough to say it is virtually non-existing. Read more »

Last week, a consortium of Dutch publishers unveiled the so called “delay app”, which allows the reader to choose a story to read while waiting. It allows the user to chose a story from a well-known Dutch author to match the time you spent waiting, from 5 to 60 minutes. It still has some issues: the app contains a certain amount of stories so no new content can be added and it is only for the iPad and iphone.  Read more »

Two pieces of news from Amazon yesterday - one anticipated, one very surprising. After launching their Romance imprint Montlake it was clear that the company had serious plans to move into regular publishing. Yesterday the Thomas & Mercer Mystery Imprint was announced, launching with four titles. Read more »

The traditional value chain of the publishing world has become rather a tangled mess of late. Traditional roles are constantly being redefined and all parties involved are looking for the right way to go about in the new digital age of publishing. Just a quick scan of recent developments shows that the value chain really has become the value network Clayton M. Christensen speaks of . Read more »