David Wilk has an interesting piece on the Digital Book World web site he published recently entitled Why it’s Too Early for Publishers to Give up on Media-Rich Ebooks:
Some observers of digital publishing have questioned why the many powerful tablets in the market have not brought forth a new generation of media-rich ebooks that delight readers with new forms of digital reading experiences. Meanwhile the current common wisdom among publishers is that there is no viable market for what have become known as “enhanced ebooks."
He goes on to list many different reasons for why he feels these next generation eBooks make sense. What I found the most interesting thing about this article were the great comments on it, in particular this comment from Jon Feldman at OAP (Disclosure: my employer Inkling has acquired two consumer book brands from OAP):
David, your essay nicely lays out the challenges and paradoxes in this space...
What’s missing among the traditional publishers is digital marketing savvy, and patience. For example, nearly two years since the launch of our title “Master Your DSLR Camera”, we’ve now *sold* over 100,000 units, and for far more than 99 cents (it sells for $9.99 and is sometimes discounted to $4.99). It’s not enough to make great products. You need a new kind of hustle to sell them. Publishers need new digital-only marketing teams that come from non-publishing backgrounds and live in the digital trenches — people who eat and sleep digital paid marketing funnels, landing page a/b testing, app store optimization, SEO, SEM, Facebook mobile ads, and more.
In particular I found this fact revealing from Jon:
Our ebooks as iOS apps sell 10-30X more in the App Store than the same titles do in the iBookstore [1].
I encourage you to read the other comments on that story; lots of insightful thoughts from many folks.
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