Publishers Threatened By Little Old eBooks

By Jennifer Hudock on December 14th, 2009

With holidays just around the corner electronic readers like the Sony, Kindle and Nook seem to be on the wish lists of just about everyone I know. Selling for just around $250, you may balk at the cost, but in the long run, electronic readers promise to pay for themselves, thanks to the low price of electronic downloads. They are also geared toward the more environmentally conscious, cutting back on the number of trees used to print paper books.

Publishing houses shrieked like a pack of banshees when they discovered this, and the reverberations of that shriek echoed through the news this last week. Three major publishers, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins announced their decision to delay the digital release of upcoming books so consumers have no choice but to buy the hardcover edition if they want to read the book as soon as it comes out. What does that mean to you and me? Well, if you get a Kindle, Nook or Sony eReader this holiday season, you’re not going to be able to access new releases until the hardcover edition has been on shelves for at least four months.

No matter how much I love the smell of a brand new book fresh off the shelf, I tend to travel a lot. Let me tell you, lugging a bag of books across country is a pain. If I can download it onto my device and toss it into my purse on-the-go, no one needs to ask me twice to download. The Digital Age is upon us. No one can deny that times are changing, and it is completely understandable that old-school publishers feel threatened, but instead of breaking with the wind, they might find alternatives and bend just a little.

As a bustling nation who barely has time to sit down and eat most times, we tend to have even less time to enjoy a good book these days. Publishers need to consider the number of readers they can reach thanks to the convenience and cost-efficiency of digital media, rather than the amount of money they’re going to lose in competition to the electronic download. Gathering more readers holds the potential to balance out potential losses in the long run.