2006 and 2007 Updates:
I thought it might be interesting to provide an update on how well I predicted the future of electronic publishing. While e-books still claim only a miniscule market share, they certainly have not faded away. Perhaps the most on-target statement in the entire article is Larry Brewster’s comment that e-books would not replace printed books, but instead would complement them. An example of this is perhaps best illustrated by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, one of the most successful and widely-read books of all time. The e-book version of this book is readily available at Amazon.com and other online bookstores. Certainly, if there was no economically attractive market for such a huge bestseller, there would be no need to publish the book in digital format. No one dreamed of foregoing the printed version, but Random House\Doubleday must have had a pretty decent incentive to offer the e-book, wouldn’t you think? A quick check also found six of Michael Crichton’s bestsellers available as e-books.
A national segmentation study jointly conducted at the end
of 2004 by the Washington Post,
Frankly, I can’t really imaging subscribing to a printed newspaper, anymore, when I can so easily find local, national and international news on the Internet.
To be fair, e-books have not come even close to hitting the more bullish sales forecasts predicted by some companies like Adobe. Yet, even such vendors as Adobe (ref: Bill McCoy, August 19, 2005) retain an optimistic view that the boom is yet to arrive. The main missing ingredient to date is an e-book reader that hits the market with a similar force as did Apple’s music iPod. Most of the e-Ink companies that have the capability to produce an ultra-light device that can be held comfortably between thumb and forefinger and that would page forward or back one or multiple pages with a touch motion similar to the iPod are still in the R&D stages.
Even so, six years after my virtually unknown Print-on-Demand novel was published, I would definitely use that publishing method or e-book approach, again, rather than hold out on the slim hope that a traditional publisher might some day become interested in the manuscript. I definitely did not get rich off my novel, but I did earn enough in royalties to feel quite good about how I fared in such a competitive market, and I immensely enjoyed the experience of being published and reviewed, selling out at a majority of my book-signings. I still enjoy being introduced as a published author or novelist.
- Michael Marcotte,
5/16/2006
March 2007 update: Received a royalties check for 2006 sales of my Print-on-demand novel. Although
sales have definitely dropped off at seven years past publication, and with Amazon.com now
offering mulitiple "used" copies of my book, it is very enjoyable to still receive a check
in the mail for something I created over seven years ago, which never received any consideration
from any of the more traditional publishers.
January 2008 update: Another royalties check, for 2007 sales of my PoD book. That's eight years now.