LJNDawson.com, Consulting to the Book Publishing Industry
Book Publishing Industry Consultant

Ebooks succeed in niche markets

According to this , ebooks are doing quite well in the freaks-geeks-n-cheeks markets - gamers, college students and romance-novel readers:

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....

The nature of game books as reference material rather than pleasure reading isn't something that's easily applied to mainstream books, except for school and college textbooks, where e-books have some traction as well....

[One publisher's] bread-and-butter sales come from short PDFs, some with as few as five pages, and commensurately low prices, at $1 or $2. That's something that doesn't really work in the print world, but is perfect for electronic distribution...The same move toward shorter fare is noticeable in another market where e-books have done better than average -- romantic fiction. Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. publishes 120 to 140 romantic novels per month, all of which are also sold as e-books. But it's also started selling short stories exclusively as e-books, selling them for 89 cents.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , December 5, 07, 2:02 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post
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