Why E-books Are Such a Big Deal from Books - Culture - The Atlantic by Peter Osnos

So far, it is fair to say that the book is off to an excellent start, poised for success. But here is where the traditional method of publishing books, as it has long functioned, becomes so frustrating. PublicAffairs printed 8,010 copies of the book, and to date has shipped 4,964. The total sales in the first two weeks, according to our tracking report, are 304 copies. Most brick and mortar stores--the major chains and the independents—cannot possibly have more than two or three copies on hand, and these are unlikely to be displayed in any significant way. For all the whining about those numbers, however, the important fact to point out is that The New Nobility is available to anyone with interest in the subject, even if it admittedly is geared to an audience of finite size. Not only that, the consumer can choose from a variety of formats and price points in deciding where and how to make the purchase. The surest way to get the book is from Amazon, where the hardcover is in stock at $17.79 (discounted from the retail price of $26.95) along with a Kindle e-book version at $14.82 and a downloadable audio from Amazon's Audible for $14.96. From Apple's iPad bookstore, you can have the e-book for $12.99. Barnes & Noble has the hardcover for sale, but not the e-book. The likelihood of The New Nobility becoming a bestseller is, let's face it, nil. But instead of being lost in the great mountain of new releases that are unloaded at stores each month and almost immediately returned as excess inventory, the book is, at most, a few clicks away from ownership—and that represents a heartening development for authors and publishers. Even more encouraging is the pace at which the digital marketplace is growing. According to Publishers Weekly, sales of e-books for the first seven months of 2010 are up 191 percent over the past year, and totaled $219.5 million in revenue. In a report last week, IMS Research predicted sales of 15.6 million iPads for 2010, and an astonishing 46 million in 2011. I've done my e-book reading on the iPad since it was released in April, not just because of the quality of the reading experience, but because my wife has taken full possession of the Kindle, on which she maintains a library of fiction that assures she is never without something worth reading.

Read on at the Atlantic, here.