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Riding the Bullet Shoots Up the Place
HALF A MILLION E-BOOKS SOLD IN 48 HOURS - THE PROFESSIONAL E-BOOKCOMMUNITY FEELS BETRAYED, WHILE TRADITIONAL PUBLISHERS PANIC
What a week. It all started when Stephen King released his new book, Riding The Bullet, as an exclusive available only as a download over the internet. Within 48 hours the novelette had sold over half a million downloads, slowing servers across the Internet, including those of bookseller Amazon and digital wholesaler, SoftLock. At $2.50 each download, that's a cool $12,500,000 with no print costs and minimal overhead.The success of the downloadable novel has thrown traditional publishers such as Random House and Harper Collins into a wild panic and they have been reportedly scrambling to sign up existing authors for e-book versions.
British author, Lord Jeffery Archer, was the first to jump on the bandwagon, announcing on Saturday 18th March that he is now considering releasing an internet-only novelette. Many more authors will undoubtedly be following.
The established players who own the e-book market-space, however, including Crowsnestbooks.com and Veinotte.com, are said to be furious.
Veinotte was signed up to sell Stephen King's e-book by electronic book distributor Softlock, led to believe that SoftLock had an exclusive on the distribution rights to King's digital novel. Imagine the Crowsnest's and Veinotte's surprise when it found that on the day of the book's release, Amazon was giving the book away free in an aggressive marketing move to capture traffic. Amazon is still claiming to be giving the book away for free, but when journalists visited the site on Saturday 18th March, they found a mysterious sign saying Amazon had run out of copies.
Given that the copies are digital and can't run out, we suspect it was Amazon's marketing budget that got overwhelmed rather than their stock-room (Amazon might have been giving the book away, but they still have to pay the regular bookseller's fee to King's publisher). Barnes and Noble were also said to be giving the book away free, possibly in reaction to Amazon's 'special price' of zero.
Veinotte, just as furious as CrowsnestBooks.com at the turn of events, has published an open letter attacking the way in which the distribution of Stephen King's book to the online book-trade was handled by SoftLock. Read Veinotte's letter in full in the e-book portal section of the Crowsnest Books Web site.
For another take on the story, read "eBooks and New York Publishing: A Reluctant Marriage" by Aliske Webb on eBookNet.com.