It’s true, the market for mainstream e-books has been weak – less than 1% of the $25Billion book publishing market as recoreded by the mainstream publishing industry.
Many of us in the information product business producing our own niche-based e-books, reports and written products knows that there are many more e-books being sold directly from our own websites or from smaller e-book publishers such as cafe press.
Many of us over at InfoMarktersZone have been sharing underground techniques, strategies and case studies for months now.
Still, anyone who has taken a niche oriented e-book and published hard copies will know there is still much additional opportunity in printing their book – marketing hard copies of their products.
In recent weeks there has been a fairly powerful collection of e-book publishers, equipment and software vendors who have considerable stake in seeing e-books take on a wider mass acceptance.
They have visions of e-books being the next “hot content” to the wildly successful mp3 audio format that led the way for Ipod and the massive mp3 player market.
Here’s an interesting story that does a good job of summarizing the opportunity that is starting to emerge out of Japan and China – spreading West that indicates there may be great opportunities yet for e-book authors and publishers.
Much of the trend could be driven by better quality mobile devices now in the hands of billions of customers – the theory goes that if we can standardize on one e-book format (similar to mp3 format for audio), and availability of titles increases substantially there could very well be a massive adoption trend for mobile access to ebooks.
Now – from your perpsective as an information product marketer who may already be marketing your own e-books, it seems logical that you may want to explore the whole field of shorter e-books, text-based paid newsletter content, or special reports that are easier to read on mobile devices.
We may be moving into an era where your content will be more massively adopted, if you can provide valuable content in short, concise, standard format – that means perhaps a lower price per unit but much larger sales volumes.
Are you ready for this emerging trend?
You still may want to release those 100-200 page e-books, but think also in terms of a set of 10-15 page special reports, weekly or monthly delivery of newsletter (PDF or other standard format), Technical note update service or other recurring revenue models aimed solely at mobile users who want good, current information in a short concise format – and will pay for it.
Jeff
