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'Big bang' launch for e-books

14.03.08 Benedicte Page

Waterstone's and Borders are poised to swing decisively behind e-books for the first time, prompting a rush from publishers to ready their e-book lists. Waterstone's is in talks with publishers about the supply of e-books, and is understood to be planning a July launch for its programme. Borders is gearing up to sell e-books from its transactional website, which launches in April. Commercial director David Kohn said: "We hope to have an [e-book] offer in place by the end of 2008." Gardners is also ramping up its e-book delivery service.

Agents are being inundated with requests from publishers to clear e-book rights at speed. Philippa Milnes-Smith of LAW, head of the Association of Authors' Agents, expressed concerns that authors were being "rail-roaded". She said: "We understand where publishers are coming from, but we're concerned for authors that they get the right remuneration, and also that e-books are published to the same standard as printed books. Our overriding imperative is quality not speed." Publishers are looking for blanket clearance of rights, she said. "We treat authors individually, not as a job lot."

Publishers stressed the value of a concerted UK e-books push to consumers. Penguin has 5,000 e-book titles already available, with another 5,000 scheduled for the end of the year, including all key frontlist titles. At Pan Macmillan, Sara Lloyd, head of digital publishing, said the publisher was "significantly" ramping up its digital programme for back and frontlist.

Fionnuala Duggan, Random House Group digital director, said RHG was "working actively with the whole distribution channel" on its e-book plans. RHG aims to have an e-books list in the low thousands by the end of the year, with a mix of frontlist and backlist. It is building in a review period to its agreements with authors to allay agents' fears.

The news comes as Sony is believed to be readying itself for a third quarter UK launch of its Reader in conjunction with a UK retailer, and Amazon is understood to be planning a 2008 UK launch of its Kindle. In the US the internet giant rolled out a programme of 90,000 e-books when it launched the Kindle. Amazon, Waterstone's and Sony declined to comment.

Blog: Has the e-book finally arrived?

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By Ruth Winter

In the rush to distribute Ebooks have publishers considered the copyrights. Many high school kids can break through any embedded protection. Will authors' books suffer the same fate as that of song writers and singers? Will some downloader distribute a book to his or her friends and/or put it up on a website for the taking? Will books be sold for 99 cents?

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By friend of rachel worth

I guess the point is that everyone in book retailing has seen what has happened to hmv, virgin (or whatever it is called now), etc and how they all sat back and said it will never happen only for apple to say ..oh yes it will and we are going to make it happen. Even though the sale of physical cds are way in excess of downloads, if they could turn back the clock would hmv be as slow to get into this market? There is the potential gain no matter of initially how small it is of , but just as big a driver is the risk of missing the boat and trying to forever play catch up

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By Bleep and booster

It's tricky to know how this will go. This is a very different market to music and to apply the music download model could be catastrophic, at least in the short term. The great benefit of the iPod was not that it allowed you to download music, but it allowed you to carry around your entire music collection which you already owned and 'uploaded'. Figures suggest that 90% of music on iPods and players is put there from existing CDs. It's not yet possible to upload your existing library. People also consume music far more voraciously than they do books. The only way I can see this working short term, is by making the digital readers exceptionally cheap. Anything over £60 a device is, in my opinion, going to ensure a slow, slow take up. You will need, desperately need, a lot of people with digital reading devices for this to take off.

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