According to a February 12 article in US and World News, "Declining sales have forced major book publishers to severely cut back on staffing and drop many of their regular authors. Once considered a dirty little secret of the publishing industry, vanity presses and self-publishers like Nautilus Press, a division of the Nautilus Works, are undergoing a renaissance as authors search for new homes and alternatives to large, corporate-owned publishing houses.”In mid-February, HarperCollins announced a layoff of employees and the dissolution of several imprints: the nonfiction Collins, children’s literature Bowen Press, Latino books Rayo, and African-American books Amistad. The cuts were due to a reported steep drop in earnings.
Barnes & Noble, the popular nationwide print bookstore, announced this week that it is buying Fictionwise, one of the leading online purveyors of electronic books. B&N will also start a new online bookstore exclusively for e-book sales. This move is largely in response to the continuing failures in the print publishing industry and the decline of print book sales.
Borders Group Inc. announced just yesterday that it is laying off nearly 3% of its workforce, or 742 employees. Perhaps this reduction is due to its early support of electronic publishing and later recanting of this strategy, which left Borders behind the eight ball in the industry.
The good news? E-book publishing and e-books in general are the wave of the future and only increasing in popularity. Publishers of all types are recognizing the great potential, lower cost, and abbreviated turnaround times for producing electronic books. PR Web claims “The traditional book publishing industry is in the doldrums, but sales of e-books are up sharply”.
Publishing-Industry Network states in their March 18, 2007 article, “Books as we know them are dead”.
Amazon is now making e-book downloads available on iPhones as well as Apple’s iPod Touch – great news for those multi-taskers who like one device to perform a variety of functions.
The biggest offering at the world’s largest IT fair, CeBIT, currently being held in Hanover, Germany: e-book readers. Electronics companies are scrambling to produce devices that compete with Amazon’s Kindle 2. Digital publishing consultant Ralf Alkenbrechen states that “the evolution toward virtual books is ‘inevitable’,” with a note to publishers: “by refusing to sell books in an electronic form, you would only push consumers toward breaking the law” (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jEVpCXy4_u3JKgA4PYGxXJt-rwDg).
Hearst Corporation, media giant and parent company of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and the now-defunct San Francisco Chronicle as well as other struggling newspapers, has plans to release its own e-book reading device later this year. With so many of its print publications barely hanging or failing outright, this decision to jump on the e-book bandwagon is surely motivated by an effort to stay alive in the current economy.
In a CNN article, the Pendergrast brothers, owners of Fictionwise, made a statement that their decision to sell out to B&N was motivated by the fact that “the [e-book] business is exploding and we needed to partner with a corporation that could provide us with necessary firepower.” Five million e-book titles is the estimate of company sales and “the single largest category is romance, which he said now accounts for 50% of all sales”.
What does this all mean? It means that e-books are soon going to overtake print books in terms of availability, popularity, and method of publishing. And it means that small publishers like Champagne Books are poised to do more than compete with the big New York companies – they will replace them.
Candace Morehouse
www.candacemorehouse.com
www.romancesuspensenovels.com
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