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| Hearsay: |
E-book market may also be included at some point as well, I’m not sure.
“It’s like having a bookstore in your pocket – and more,” Michael Serbinis, Indigo’s vice-president of information technology, marketing and online business, said this week.
For its launch, Shortcovers is offering “a humongous” 50,000 book titles for sale, priced from $4.99 to $19.99, as well as individual chapters of books for 99 cents each. In addition, an estimated 200,000 sample chapters will be available free for potential users.
The takeaway messages here? Michael Serbinis sticks to the script carefully written by committee last week (I believe the construction of that sentence didn’t allow for the obligatory exclamation point after “and more”). Also, if you pay $19.99 for an e-book, you’re a stupid idiot.
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February 28th, 2009 at 10:38 am
As an author who has recently become addicted to his Sony reader, I applaud the IndigoChapters initiative to get with the electronic book phenomenon, which is rapidly gaining steam. Overall, though, Canadian publishers are not getting up to speed nearly as quickly as their American or British counterparts. My next book is being published in September by Bloomsbury Press in NY, which has put its list on the Sony store site, but I can’t buy any Bloomsbury titles for the reader because distribution rights in Canada are with Penguin. So far the only Canadian (based) publisher I’ve seen with titles on the Sony site is M&S. Hopefully that will change.
The lack of Canadian content on the Shortcovers site right now is painfully apparent. Three of my titles with Random House Canada are listed, but you can’t actually buy them in electronic form. (Again, hopefully that will change.) The lack of a Canadian publishing presence on a Canadian ebook service is painfully apparent in the Reading Lists banner choices: NYT bestsellers, Oprah’s picks, Booker prize, Hollywood, Academy Award. No Governor General’s, Writers’ Trust, Taylor, Giller, you name it. I’m looking forward to the day when Canadian publishers and Canadian retailing figures out how to get Canadian content into this new area of reading consumption.
My suspicion is that ebooks, whether in services like Shortcovers or downloadable forms like the Sony reader, will soon prove to have a significant role in the reading market out of proportion to actual participants. A few highly enthusiastic readers are going to consume an awful lot of reading material.