Quote:
Originally Posted by McDave
What other tablet computer is actually selling? Should students be buying an eBook reader and a tablet computer? Is creating content for a distribution system that mainlines directly into 50 million+ customers (growing by 5m every month) who've demonstrated they'll spend money a waste of anyone's time?
iBooks are way beyond textbooks and way beyond anything ePub delivers.
|
Warning, my reply has nothing to do with Sigil:
Oh,
horsepucky. I should know. We create tons of books that get sold on iBooks. iBooks isn't some magic carpet. Yes, it can display video. It can play audio. After that, it's basically an ePUB. YES, you can create a fixed-format kids' book for it. And YES, you can "embed" PDF's in it--but at the end of the day, you still only have x for real-estate (to see those PDF's).
But I'll tell you what you CAN'T do:
you can't create a market for it. We have 700+ authors in our client list, a shocking number NYTimes-bestsellers, Edgar winners + nominees, Macavity winners, Cristy winners--and you know what they're selling on the iBooks platform?
BUPKUS. So it can be as whiz-bang as you think it is, but nobody with iPads buys BOOKS, padawan. Apparently they're all too busy watching YouTube. (Yes, that was unwarrantedly snarky--but trust me, I know what's selling where, I get to hear about it all day.) They buy APPS and GAMES and other goodies--but I kid thee not, they do NOT buy books.
I have a client who spent $1500 (yes, FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS) creating fixed-format books for iBooks for a YA market. She's made sweet nothing on iBooks, but she's selling like CRAZY on Amazon, with a plain-old, plain-old mobi.
It's all well and good to go bonkers being artsy-fartsy or putting fleurons in your book, or embedding audio of yourself reading your own poetry (yep, have some of those too!!), but at the end of the day:
publishing is a business.
And you have to be able to sell books. So, sure, get on here and rave about the iPad. I have one myself. It does a lot of things really well; some not so great. But its book market is, in a word:
DISMAL.
So let's not forget that what you make, you WANT to sell. Unless you're deranged. So iAuthor might be the greatest thing since Garageband or edible undies, but you still gotta be able to
sell the product. B&N
consistently outsells Apple, in the ePUB market, by a HUGE margin.
JMHO, based on 3 years in this biz, and several thousand books selling on everything from Diesel to BooksOnBoard to B&N to Apple to Amazon...
Hitch