E-books are a big hit in certain niches
NEW YORK -- For a decade now, publishers have been hoping to wean readers off books and move them to electronic versions, which are much cheaper to produce and distribute.
It just hasn't happened, even with the support of an electronics giant like Sony, which put out a dedicated e-book reader last year. Amazon.com Inc. recently followed up with its own reader, the Kindle.
But if you look away from the mainstream publishing industry, e-books are already a success in a few niches where they are giving rise to new ways of doing business. The standout example is role-playing games, but buyers of college textbooks and even romance novels are warming to e-books.
Witness Gareth-Michael Skarka, a representative of one of the newest professions: the e-book publisher. "E-book publishers" that reformat printed books into electronic formats have been around for a while, but Skarka commissions, edits and sells books that overwhelmingly never see print and would never have existed if it weren't for electronic publishing.
"Most of our customers are fairly comfortable with the electronic format," said Skarka. He pulls in around $50,000 a year in sales, enough to make a living of it in Lawrence, Kan., where he is based.
The 156 e-books in Portable Document Format, or PDF, sold by Skarka's Adamant Entertainment aren't exactly highbrow literature. With titles like "Slavers of Mars," and "One Million Magic Items," they're aimed at people who play role-playing games -- the most famous of which would be "Dungeons & Dragons." Skarka's prices are mostly less than $10, but the e-books aren't hugely cheaper than printed books because most of the PDFs are short.
Role-players buy lots of books, which contain rules for their games or expand on the imaginary worlds in which they are set. It's fiction, but it's more like reference material than the kind of long narratives you'd find in novels. Industry insiders see that as a big reason PDFs work for role-players.
"In general, it's not the 300-page prose novels that people want to read on the screen," said Steve Wieck, who co-founded one of the most successful publishers of role-playing games, Atlanta-based White Wolf Inc., in the early '90s.
Wieck started noticing a lot of White Wolf's releases would be scanned by fans and pirated online. Following a "can't beat 'em -- join 'em" strategy, he and his brother started DriveThruRPG.com in 2004 to sell PDFs, gathering books from many publishers, including Adamant Entertainment.
Wieck and Skarka estimate e-book sales make up 10 percent of the $25 million in annual RPG sales. DriveThruRPG alone does $2 million in business annually. By comparison, the Association of American publishers put 2006 e-book sales at $54 million, 0.02 percent of total book sales of $24.2 billion.
Two lessons learned by Wieck and others in the RPG industry are applicable to mainstream books: don't lock up the content and sell short.
When major publishers sell e-books, they encrypt the files with so-called DRM, or digital rights management, technology. It keeps the buyers from passing on the files to others, at minimum. DRM sometimes does other things as well, like preventing printing, or setting an expiration date after which the book is no longer legible.
DriveThruRPG abandoned DRM in 2005. Customers hated the hassle of dealing with it, and it didn't offer very good protection against piracy, Wieck said. Now, the site sells unprotected PDFs with a faint "watermark" with the customer's name on every page. Sales rose 30 percent after the change.
Skarka's bread-and-butter sales come from short PDFs, some with as few as five pages, and commensurately low prices, at $1 or $2.
"The more we treat a PDF like a book, the less likely people are to get it," Skarka said. "You price it low enough that the consumer thinks of it as disposable."