When Mike Violano looks at the list of recent best-selling eBooks, he hopes he sees a trend.
Instead of a litany of science fiction and high-tech how-to manuals, the list of top 10 June eBooks looks very much like a traditional print bestseller list, with familiar titles such as the top-selling “The DaVinci Code” and Bill Clinton’s “My Life.” A dictionary and even a manual on sex and relationships are also among the top-sellers-a fact that might have been unthinkable not so long ago.
“When you go back a few years, the typical customer of eBooks tended to be kind of a techie,” said Mike Violano, vice president and general manager of eReader.com, the world’s largest seller of eBooks. “But that is really changing. As we see the number of customers grow, the (eBook reader’s) profile is starting to look like a regular book reader’s, except that it’s slightly younger.”
According to the Open eBook Forum, 421,955 eBooks were sold in the first quarter of 2004, marking a 46-percent increase from last year. A recent agreement between PalmOne and PowerByHand, eReader.com’s parent company, allowed the launch of the palmOne eBook store last week, putting 13,000 titles “on the shelves” of the new store.
Still, electronic books have a long way to go before fulfilling the predictions some analysts had in the industry’s earliest days.
“It’s definitely still in its infancy,” Violano said of the medium. “Last year, there were all these reports that eBooks were dead. That’s not true, but the claims of years ago are just taking a little longer to get started.”
Part of the problem is that publishers are sometimes reticent to release an electronic version of a book until months after a print version has been published. And there’s no denying that a video monitor can lack the charm of a traditional cloth-and-paper edition.
The key, he said, is getting a potential customer to pick up an eBook for the first time. And it doesn’t hurt that many eBooks are less than half the price of their weighty counterparts.
“In my mind, we’re still very much in the customer acquisition business,” said Violano. “Once we develop the habit, we can see customers come back more and more often, and buy more eBooks.”
