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E Publishing: Pricing & Changes in the Market
Last week ePub Direct held a conference on digital change in publishing – this is an excellent report from the Irish Times, summarising changes in the market:
E-BOOKS MAY BE one of the fastest growing areas of publishing, with online bookseller Amazon reporting it now sells more digital than print books, but publishers still find the area deeply challenging even as the marketplace explodes, speakers told an e-publishing conference in Dublin last week.
“What publishing was, was a predictable, stable business model,” Rebecca Smart, chief executive of UK publishing group Osprey, says. Selling as well as distributing publications online has turned that model upside down. “In a market where margins are low, there isn’t necessarily room for the [old] business model.”
The importance of e-books to big publishers as well as small is clear, says Patrick Crowley, who works with the conference organiser, ePub Direct, an Irish-based distributor of e-books for publishers like Sony and Amazon.
He notes that HarperCollins has predicted that 50 per cent of its fiction sales will be in e-books within the next 18 months, and that its e-book sales have grown 250 per cent year on year.
Read the full article here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/0913/1224323956979.html
