Bloomsbury Goes Digital

On the 28^th of this month, Bloomsbury launched its first purely digital imprint, Bloomsbury Reader, with a view to resurrect out of print books.

The publisher is focusing on books which are out of print and where all English-language rights have reverted back to the author or the author’s estate.

One hurdle for Bloomsbury has been finding hard copies of books that have been out of print for a long time. According to Stephanie Duncan, digital media director at Bloomsbury Publishing, . “It’s actually, in some instances, a struggle to find a print copy that we can start the process with. In that sense it’s sort of saving books as well for future generations.”

Another challenge is to reach a big enough audience and make the works stand out in a marketplace that tends to be dominated by bestseller lists and “hot” new titles.

Duncan added that the new venture was working closely with other publishers rather than competing against them.

Source http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/28/uk-books-bloomsbury-digital-idUSLNE78R02P20110928

Kindle & Public Libraries
Kindle’s move to open up its services to library books raises fear with publishers that this will reduce sales even more. This raises the spectrum of a large numbers of customers turning to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits.

Library e-books were already available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, smartphones, laptops and other devices, but never on the Kindle, whose users had long complained that they were left out.

“We do get asked the question frequently: ‘Can I use my Kindle to download your e-books?’ ” says John F. Szabo, director of Georgia’s Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System. “And the answer has been no.”

According to Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries and schools, connecting libraries with the Kindle, the most successful device and the largest e-book seller in the business, is going to bring millions of readers to the public library.

Though careful not to publicly criticize the ebook growing presence in public libraries, in view of the popularity of the status of these institution in communities, publishers find the development troubling and are concerned it might lead to a further unraveling of the traditional sales model.

As e-books have taken off with readers, libraries have been building their e-book collections to meet demand, persuading many publishers to sell their titles to libraries in e-book format.

Numbers released by Christopher Platt, director of collections and circulating operations at the New York Public Library, indicating that, from January to September, the number of e-books checked out increased by 75 percent over the same period last year, are worrying for the publishing industry, as many of these borrowers have left the buying realm for the borrowing realm.

Already, at least two of the six major publishers, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, do not make their e-books available to libraries.

To date, about 67 percent of libraries nationally offer access to e-books, a 12 percent increase from two years ago, according to the American Library Association. Most libraries work through OverDrive, which acts as a middleman between publishers and libraries.