Romance, DRM and the Future of Reading at Digital Book 2009

The book publishing industry may be suffering through a tough economy—not to mention being in the throes of reinventing itself—but the International Digital Publishing Forum’s annual Digital Book conference in New York offered an oasis of growth and an optimistic focus on the future of digital publishing and reading. Indeed, Tuesday's afternoon sessions at Digital Book 2009 surveyed an e-book sector that is growing steadily, experimenting and diversifying its products and practices and working to identify consumers and their e-book reading and buying habits. 

The most obvious themes at the afternoon session of DB 2009 were the importance of both women readers and the romance genre to digital publishing as well as the promotion of IDPF’s epub standard and the industry’s problematic response to DRM. There was also a segment devoted to the growth of the Sony Reader, nearly drowned out by a chorus of hype about the various Kindle devices. Long identified as voracious trade book readers, women were identified as the prototypical e-book reader, while the romance genre—with hundreds of new releases each month—is just as robust in the digital publishing sector as it is print. More than ever Digital Rights Management—and even the notion of e-book piracy—was portrayed as more of a problem to the developing e-book market than e-book piracy itself. 

In the panel on emerging e-book business models, O’Reilly Media’s Andrew Savikas said that while overall sales of O’Reilly’s print computer books were down about 20%, e-book sales were up. E-book sales are about 10% of all sales made through the O’Reilly website and Savikas outlined an O’Reilly strategy to bundle print titles with e-book editions (in PDF, Kindle and Mobipocket formats) with no DRM (and lifetime free updates) at a discounted price point. “E-books are a small market, but they are catching up. Sales are doubling about every 18 months,” he said. Savikas said e-books sales help drive print sales and in the first of many criticisms of DRM that afternoon, proclaimed that the “obscurity” of unheralded authors and books is reinforced by DRM and is a bigger threat to publishing and book sales than e-book piracy. “We have to change the perception that a pirated e-book means a lost sale,” Savikas said.

Savikas was followed by several publishers hailing the importance of women readers and genre fiction to the e-book market. Angela James of Samhaim Publishing, a primarily digital publisher specializing in genre fiction, especially romance, outlined an e-publishing strategy that entails “quality,” no author advances (but royalties of 30% to 40%) and “no DRM, ever,” with multiple online distribution channels (including its own online bookstore), lots of online consumer feedback and pervasive marketing through social media, i.e., Twitter, Facebook and all the rest. “DRM is bad for customer service, discourages readers and doesn’t stop or slow piracy anyway,” said James. 

Later on a panel devoted to What Consumers Want, blogger Sarah Wendell of the Smart Bitches Trashy Novels blog (9 million pages views in April), a champion of romance fiction, gave a witty presentation on women (“voracious readers”), e-books and desirable e-reading devices (wireless, all formats, nice design, adjustable fonts and no DRM). Harlequin director of digital content Malle Vallik said Harlequin publishes more e-books (140 titles) each month than print books, though she admitted that Harlequin authors demand DRM—to a display of dismay and mock weeping by Wendell. “Our readers want e-books,” said Vallik, “whatever sells in print sells just as well in digital. Backlist is big and half our sales each month. Readers want interoperability, more titles, nicely designed devices, adjustable fonts and blurbs for fiction.”

Library e-book usage is growing steadily (Brooklyn Public reports 8,000 users in early 2009) and both print and e-book circulation is growing in tandem. There were presentations by the Sony Reader’s Robert Nell (“sell-through is strong” and U.S. retailers will double to 6,000 in 2009). There’s a new French non-wireless e-reading device , The Bookeen, coming to the U.S. market in June; and Neelan Choksi, CEO of Lexcyle, developer of the popular iphone e-book app Stanza, recently acquired by Amazon, reports that there are 1.8 million stanza users in over 60 countries and the device supports about 110,000 titles. 

In the midst of this economy, spending an afternoon at Digital Book 2009 offered real information about the growth of a new kind of book market as well as a refreshing vision of the future of publishing and reading (we’ll be reading on paper as well as on screens of various sizes) that we can all live with.