As a publisher and as a reader I'm going along with Amazon at the moment because we have to due to their high sales. But in the long term I think ePub is more important and we're going that route too. ePub lets us sell on our own website, authors can sell on their websites, I have talks with various organisations who can sell our ePub ebooks, major bookshops can sell our ePub ebooks, and this is really going to grow enormously this year, in my opinion.
All the signs are there judging by the contacts I'm getting privately as a publisher and I'm going to meetings this very week with the most likely canditates to sell and lend our ePub books. I won't stop selling our books on Kindle and reading books on Kindle. I have a Kindle and love it. But the future will involve ePub as it gets round serious problems.
The serious problems are these. We can't sell Kindle books to large parts of the world where we have a following and Kindles can't be made available for some reason (this includes Malaysia and surrounding region). ePub can. We don't have to sign exclusivity clauses with other online sellers and libraries that are setting up for ePub. Amazon tries to lock us in with exclusivity clauses if we want to use some of their promotional services like KDP Select. These services are also badly organised as they mix giving away free ebooks (which isn't a good idea for our authors straight after their print book launch as it looks like we're offloading hard-to-sell books), with the lending library - which is a service I would like to be involved in. However, to be in the library we mustn't sell anywhere else, which is totally unacceptable. It's all a bit of a mess for professional publishers, so we're definitely looking to support other methods.
It's easier for us to do ebook conversions well using ePub. Amazon hangs on to so much control with their proprietary system that little things go wrong with our poetry formatting, and poetry formatting is a very precise thing. Little formatting errors creep in once we upload, even though our conversion seems perfect. It's mainly to do with the way long lines in poetry have to indent slightly if they run over, so that the reader knows it's all the same line. There is a correct way to convert it for ebooks, but the formatting errors still creep in after uploading, and this isn't professional enough.
Amazon makes it hard for us to give competitive prices due to the large commission they take - which is a minimum of 30%, can sometimes be 65% in certain countries (and we have a following in those countries so it affects us). They can even pay us nothing if they find a competitive price. No bookseller does this to us except Amazon. A bookshop only charges a 30% markup on books we supply direct, and they have the cost of premises and limited shelf space to take into consideration.
So the Amazon mark-up on prices isn't something we're happy with. Being able to sell and lend books on ePub on more websites is highly desirable. It will take off and I'm pretty sure this is the year it's going to happen quickly.
|