My job is selling technology. Actually I'm more of a translator. I sell technology to other businesses and that's where things get weird. There is a bewildering array of tech out there and unfortunately many companies think technology sells itself and the value that the technology delivers should be obvious. Wrong. That's where I come in. I said I was a translator. My job is to translate techno babble into value that customers understand. This blog share my adventures with high tech sales. Selling high tech is fun so come join me on my sales journey!

Thursday 3 January 2013

Battle of the eBooks

Sales of eBooks have surpassed paper sales.

I don't think this means the death of paper publishing but it does mean the long tail of books is set to get longer. Approximately 70% of books sell less than 100 copies in their life time. This ultimately  means that these niche titles are well suited to electronic publishing. For those minority of books in the best seller category, they will of course remain available in paper.

As people increasingly migrate to eBooks, we have the battle of the eBook readers.

Most people have heard of Kindle, Amazon's reader but there are others out there such as Nook, Kobo and more....

I've currently published books on Kindle and Kobo. I am monitoring the effectiveness of these sales channels and will publish a blog in future contrasting the effectiveness of these channels. The reader is after all a sales channel.

So far I haven't managed to publish on Nook. Nook is Barnes and Noble's attempt at e-readers.  My thoughts are at this time they need to up their game. As an author I can't publish on Nook.

Why?

Well I don't have a USA bank account. Currently their PubIt!  publishing system does not permit non USA based authors! Seems to me that if they want to compete with Amazon they urgently need to fix this. Or maybe this is a subliminal ploy to demonstrate USA authoring supremacy.

Amazon have adopted a policy with their KDP Select offering which is there to stifle competition.  With KDP Select, users are encouraged to opt-in to an exclusivity arrangement where content is only available via Kindle.  Given Nook won't accept my content, the exclusivity is really a battle between Kindle and Kobo at the moment however it will eventually starve competition of content.

Given the speed at which change is happening to the publishing industry, it is interesting times.  I will keep you updated on progress through the year.

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