Michael beat me to it last week, but I wanted to reflect further on the Waterstones / Sony ebook launch last week. Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a *correction: five* figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September.
As I’m sure all of those working in the digital publishing departments of trade publishing houses will agree, it’s nice finally to have a major high street bookselling brand pitch itself into the ebook ring so wholeheartedly – and the Sony device is the most compelling (and competitively priced) there is of the dedicated devices so far available here in the UK. I must say it did make my heart leap just a little bit to see huge POS displays promoting the Sony Reader and the associated ebook catalogue from Waterstones in the Tottenham Court Road and Piccadilly branches, and it was fun to go in and do some underground detective work to discover that the Waterstones staff seemed quite clued up about it all.
There has certainly been an uplift on direct sales of ebooks from our own web site over the weekend, although this may well have something to do with our our promotion of eight non-drm’d SF books which started last week. It is also bringing out terrible trainspotting tendencies in me as I find myself wanting to look at our web-based sales analysis tool on a regular basis…
As for the press and publicity; well, the media seems to have gone mad for it, don’t they? Not always in a positive way, but based on the premise that all publicity is good publicity, great timing, Sony and Waterstones! Launching on the back of silly season and given the choice of a piece about a ‘potential revolution in reading’ or another funny animal story, Sony seems to have won every time. However, as Diane Shipley has written on the Picador blog here, it would be nice to see a little more excitement in the media, a little less of the wrinkled noses.
Of course, I still believe the future of books on screen is not going to be dominated by a single, dedicated reading device. I don’t really believe the Sony reader is the killer device or even a killer device, but it’s certainly making an impact on the media and consumer imaginations. And I am becoming quite fond of mine. Reading will no doubt continue to take place across a variety of mediums dependent on the reader’s personal lifestyle, preferred existing gadget(s) and tendency towards paper sniffing – or not.
And now for a little grumble: it would be really, really be nice if you could actually search the Waterstones ebook site by author / title / ISBN / keyword rather than having to browse the category or bestseller pages. Harrumph.
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Sara, hi. Re your harrumph, I quite agree, though one way around this is to go to the advanced search, specify e-book as the format, and then enter author, title, keyword or whatever. That seems to work.
Well, I got my Reader through the post and after playing with it today personally like it lots, find it helps focus the mind on the text, and am sure my mum and the ‘butwhatswrongwithrealbooksyoullneverreplacetheirlookandfeel’ brigade will be won over by it, but it’s useless for the kind of multimedia creative innovation in literature that is really what interests me about words on screen, so this tipping point feels curious.. one step forward and at least one step back. Lots to discuss at Small Wonder!
Oh and I meant to say, thanks to Michael and James for their contribution to the if:bookgroup last night, documented at http://www.bookfutures.blogspot.com.
On the Saturday of release I went into the Trafford Centre to see the Reader at first hand and buy one if happy. After a play with the display unit the purchase was thwarted by both Waterstones and the Sony shop having sold out. An online purchase at the Sony shop had the Reader in my hands on Tuesday. So either they did not have many or they are really popular. There did seem to be a lot of interest in the display unit.
I absolutely love my 505. However, the content is king, and if the current support from the publishers is anything to go by, it’s not going to make it. Until we have the opportunity to buy _any_ book, not just the handful that the publishers choose, it’s going to be difficult to recommend the device as anything more than a toy to most. people. The crippling DRM doesn’t help either - I applaud your first steps in removing this ridiculous system. Let’s hope it continues.
Now my grumble: I purchased my first ebook from panmacmillan.com (Cultural Amnesia), only to find that it will not plan at all on my 505. Purchased ebooks from other publishers work fine, as does this book on the desktop. However, trying to view on-device results in ‘Page Error’. Not happy at all.
FYI, I fixed the book for the PRS-505. After some sleuthing, I found out that the epub reader software on the Sony has a limit of 300k per file inside the epub file. Your publishing software mustn’t have got the memo
Thankfully, because the file isn’t DRM’d, I was able to split the source files inside the epub in order to make it readable on the 505. While that makes me a happy bunny, I can’t see casual readers putting up with something like this! I know it’s early days, but if we’re going to be beta testers, can we at least get a discount
Anyway, I’d suggest fixing the epub file… Now, finally on with the reading!
Hi Alan- thanks for your comments - we’re sorry to hear you had a problem with the Cultural Amnesia file (but glad to hear you found a solution) - we’ll look into this issue right away.
BTW, although I agree that the choice of titles must be frustrating, it’s not really because publishers are purposefully withholding a lot of titles, and only releasing some. It’s a question of time and money, you know, as any production process is - we’re going as fast as we can! No doubt as ebook sales take-off and publishers establish a decent revenue stream in this area, that will in turn enable digitisation of more titles. Or to put it another way, the more folks buy, the more there will be to buy.
Cheers,
James
Oh I absolutely understand, it’s just frustrating trying to convince potential buyers - although I’m doing my best! And I’m very pleased that PanMac are doing their best in regard to removing DRM from the list of reasons people have for not buying. Keep up the great work, it is much appreciated by us early adopters.
Just got mine last week! For older people like myself, the directions are not that easy to understand. However, the nice people at BooksOnBoard - link to their Sony help page: http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?F=sony_reader_help_ - helped me muddle through it, and I absolutely love it. I think once you understand it, it’s quite simple to use.
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