Quick Notes - eBooks as movies / eBooks as CDs

Our "Catch 'Em..." story about technologies designed to lock you into a single Web site rather than allow you Web browsing (http://olddognewtricksreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/2009-in-review-catch-em-and-keep-em-net.html) addressed eBook readers as one example of the phenomenon.

Now we have a new paradigm for eBooks - "they're like the movies."

NOW PLAYING

Many of us are used to seeing the tiered approach by which films are marketed:

1. in theatres,
2. pay-per-view-and-airline,
3. home video,
4. cable TV and
5. network TV

Well, apparently eBook marketing is going to follow a similar path.

"The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback," according to the chief economic officer of Simon and Schuster publishing, quoted in today's Wall Street Journal article, which also states the current publisher of the former Time-Warner Press will be scheduling similarly.

This news comes in time for some people to cancel their orders for the Kindle/ nook/ Papyrus/ Cool-er/ Reader/ Readius/ Bookeen/ Astak/ iRex/ eSlick/ WISE that won't arrive by December 25th. [Gee - is this vertical market getting crowded?]

Audio book customers know that audio books - with no standard digital rights management imposed - typically arrive in stores (or on Amazon's Audible subsidiary site) concurrent with the release of the title, be its first release hardback or paperback. Whether this continues or the digital delays begin impacting audio equivalents will be an interesting issue to watch in the New Year.

PIRATES!!!

The Quill & Quire blog quotes several sources in an interesting story (http://www.quillandquire.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/30/as-e-book-sales-soar-so-does-piracy/) suggesting that book publishers are going to start playing the prediction game that is doing SO WELL for the recording industry.

• Dan Brown's latest thriller, "The Lost Symbol" has "been illegally downloaded more than 100,000 times"!!!
• Publishers lost SIX HUNDRED MILLION in 2008 to piracy!!!
• Top pirated books - sex, do-it-yourself and Twilight (more or less in that order)!!!

In the record industry (one more time, the book is "Appetite for Self-Destruction"), the game is played like this:

• Performer X sold 250,000 copies of their first CD
• Performer Y is "just like Performer X"
• Performer Y only sold 112,000 copies of THEIR first CD
• PIRACY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR 138,000 SALES LOST

We await more scintillating logic, embarrassing exaggerations and the occasional just-plain LIE, while noting, sadly, that magazines are publishing more and more of their content on line RATHER than in the pages, and subscriptions are getting cheaper and cheaper as they grow more and more desperate for subscription sales to add to their newsstand sale totals.

Giving books for Christmas, I remain your mostly-trustworthy and ever-lovin' Unclejack