Skyrock
t. Sgeyerog :DDDDD
- Registriert
- 10. September 2003
- Beiträge
- 13.448
Via theRPGsite habe ich diesen Artikel aus der amerikanischen Lokalzeitung "Tucson Citizen" bekommen, in dem als Beispiel für die langsame Durchsetzung von eBooks der Rollenspielmarkt herangezogen wird und u.a. Gareth Micheal Skarka von Adamant Entertainment und Steve Wieck von DriveThruRPG ein paar konkrete Zahlen rausrücken.
Da ich nicht weiß wie lange der Artikel online einsehbar ist kopiere ich ihn auch mal hier rein:
Slow-starting e-books find niche markets
NEW YORK (AP) -- For a decade now, publishers have been hoping to wean readers off books and move them to electronic versions, which are much cheaper to produce and distribute.
It just hasn't happened, even with the support of an electronics giant like Sony, which put out a dedicated e-book reader last year. Amazon.com Inc. recently followed up with its own reader.
But if you look away from the mainstream publishing industry, e-books are already a success in a few niches, where they are giving rise to new ways of doing business. The standout example is role-playing games, but buyers of college textbooks and even romance novels are warming to e-books.
Witness Gareth-Michael Skarka, a representative of one of our newest professions: the e-book publisher. "E-book publishers" that reformat printed books into electronic formats have been around for a while, but Skarka commissions, edits and sells books that overwhelmingly never see print, and would never have existed if it weren't for electronic publishing.
"Most of our customers are fairly comfortable with the electronic format," said Skarka. He pulls in around $50,000 a year in sales, enough to make a living of it in Lawrence, Kan., where he is based.
The 156 e-books in Portable Document Format, or PDF, sold by Skarka's Adamant Entertainment aren't exactly highbrow literature. With titles like "Slavers of Mars," and "One Million Magic Items," they're aimed at people who play role-playing games - the most famous of which would be "Dungeons & Dragons." Skarka's prices are mostly less than $10, but the e-books aren't hugely cheaper than printed books, because most of the PDFs are short.
Role-players buy lots of books, which contain rules for their games or expand on the imaginary worlds in which they are set. It's fiction, but it's more like reference material than the kind of long narratives you'd find in novels. Industry insiders see that as a big reason PDFs work for role-players.
"In general, it's not the 300-page prose novels that people want to read on the screen," said Steve Wieck, who co-founded one of the most successful publishers of role-playing games, Atlanta-based White Wolf Inc., in the early 90s.
Wieck started noticing that a lot of White Wolf's releases would be scanned by fans and pirated online. Following a "can't beat 'em - join 'em" strategy, he and his brother started DriveThruRPG.com in 2004 to sell PDFs, gathering books from many publishers, including Adamant Entertainment.
Wieck and Skarka estimate that e-book sales make up 10 percent of the $25 million in annual RPG sales. DriveThruRPG alone does $2 million in business annually. By comparison, the Association of American publishers put 2006 e-book sales at $54 million, 0.02 percent of total book sales of $24.2 billion.
Marc Zuckerman, a role-player in Rockville Centre, N.Y., bought his first e-book six months ago, even though he already has, or at least may have, a print copy of the book. His copy of the superhero game "Villains and Vigilantes" got lost in a move. Originally published in 1982, it's long out of print but available on DriveThruRPG.
"It's really nifty to be able to walk into a gaming session and plug in my laptop and everything is there, as opposed to lugging 40 books," Zuckerman said.
The nature of game books as reference material rather than pleasure reading isn't something that's easily applied to mainstream books, except for school and college textbooks, where e-books have some traction as well (textbook sales are not counted in the e-book figure above). But two other lessons learned by Wieck and others in the RPG industry are more applicable: don't lock up the content, and sell short.
When major publishers sell e-books, they encrypt the files with so-called DRM, or digital rights management, technology. It keeps the buyers from passing on the files to others, at minimum. DRM sometimes does other things as well, like preventing printing, or setting an expiration date after which the book is no longer legible.
DriveThruRPG abandoned DRM in 2005. Customers hated the hassle of dealing with it, and it didn't offer very good protection against piracy, Wieck said. Now, the site sells unprotected PDFs with a faint "watermark" with the customer's name on every page. Sales rose 30 percent after the change.
On the publishing side, Skarka isn't concerned about the lack of encryption.
"If someone is going to pirate my stuff, that's not a lost sale to me - that person was never going to buy it," Skarka said. "It's such a small niche market and hobby that gamers in general don't have a problem paying to patronize things they like."
Skarka's bread-and-butter sales come from short PDFs, some with as few as five pages, and commensurately low prices, at $1 or $2. That's something that doesn't really work in the print world, but is perfect for electronic distribution.
"The more we treat a PDF like a book, the less likely people are to get it," Skarka said. "You price it low enough that the consumer thinks of it as disposable."
The same move toward shorter fare is noticeable in another market where e-books have done better than average - romantic fiction. Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. publishes 120 to 140 romantic novels per month, all of which are also sold as e-books. But it's also started selling short stories exclusively as e-books, selling them for 89 cents.
E-book sales still make up less than 1 percent of Harlequin's sales, according to Malle Vallik, the company's director of digital content. She wouldn't give a more specific figure.
Another publishing niche that Wieck believe could do well with e-publishing is comics. There's a huge back catalog that's out of print, and many comics readers are tech savvy. He started a site to sell electronic comics, but so far has had only minor publishers sign up. In November, Marvel Enterprises Inc., home of Spider-Man, launched a site that gives paying subscribers access to back copies, but won't let them download.
Wieck has also been helping another e-book site get off the ground, with products that are also reference materials, but otherwise about as far as you can get from "Dungeons & Dragons:" textbooks for homeschoolers.
Da ich nicht weiß wie lange der Artikel online einsehbar ist kopiere ich ihn auch mal hier rein:
Slow-starting e-books find niche markets
NEW YORK (AP) -- For a decade now, publishers have been hoping to wean readers off books and move them to electronic versions, which are much cheaper to produce and distribute.
It just hasn't happened, even with the support of an electronics giant like Sony, which put out a dedicated e-book reader last year. Amazon.com Inc. recently followed up with its own reader.
But if you look away from the mainstream publishing industry, e-books are already a success in a few niches, where they are giving rise to new ways of doing business. The standout example is role-playing games, but buyers of college textbooks and even romance novels are warming to e-books.
Witness Gareth-Michael Skarka, a representative of one of our newest professions: the e-book publisher. "E-book publishers" that reformat printed books into electronic formats have been around for a while, but Skarka commissions, edits and sells books that overwhelmingly never see print, and would never have existed if it weren't for electronic publishing.
"Most of our customers are fairly comfortable with the electronic format," said Skarka. He pulls in around $50,000 a year in sales, enough to make a living of it in Lawrence, Kan., where he is based.
The 156 e-books in Portable Document Format, or PDF, sold by Skarka's Adamant Entertainment aren't exactly highbrow literature. With titles like "Slavers of Mars," and "One Million Magic Items," they're aimed at people who play role-playing games - the most famous of which would be "Dungeons & Dragons." Skarka's prices are mostly less than $10, but the e-books aren't hugely cheaper than printed books, because most of the PDFs are short.
Role-players buy lots of books, which contain rules for their games or expand on the imaginary worlds in which they are set. It's fiction, but it's more like reference material than the kind of long narratives you'd find in novels. Industry insiders see that as a big reason PDFs work for role-players.
"In general, it's not the 300-page prose novels that people want to read on the screen," said Steve Wieck, who co-founded one of the most successful publishers of role-playing games, Atlanta-based White Wolf Inc., in the early 90s.
Wieck started noticing that a lot of White Wolf's releases would be scanned by fans and pirated online. Following a "can't beat 'em - join 'em" strategy, he and his brother started DriveThruRPG.com in 2004 to sell PDFs, gathering books from many publishers, including Adamant Entertainment.
Wieck and Skarka estimate that e-book sales make up 10 percent of the $25 million in annual RPG sales. DriveThruRPG alone does $2 million in business annually. By comparison, the Association of American publishers put 2006 e-book sales at $54 million, 0.02 percent of total book sales of $24.2 billion.
Marc Zuckerman, a role-player in Rockville Centre, N.Y., bought his first e-book six months ago, even though he already has, or at least may have, a print copy of the book. His copy of the superhero game "Villains and Vigilantes" got lost in a move. Originally published in 1982, it's long out of print but available on DriveThruRPG.
"It's really nifty to be able to walk into a gaming session and plug in my laptop and everything is there, as opposed to lugging 40 books," Zuckerman said.
The nature of game books as reference material rather than pleasure reading isn't something that's easily applied to mainstream books, except for school and college textbooks, where e-books have some traction as well (textbook sales are not counted in the e-book figure above). But two other lessons learned by Wieck and others in the RPG industry are more applicable: don't lock up the content, and sell short.
When major publishers sell e-books, they encrypt the files with so-called DRM, or digital rights management, technology. It keeps the buyers from passing on the files to others, at minimum. DRM sometimes does other things as well, like preventing printing, or setting an expiration date after which the book is no longer legible.
DriveThruRPG abandoned DRM in 2005. Customers hated the hassle of dealing with it, and it didn't offer very good protection against piracy, Wieck said. Now, the site sells unprotected PDFs with a faint "watermark" with the customer's name on every page. Sales rose 30 percent after the change.
On the publishing side, Skarka isn't concerned about the lack of encryption.
"If someone is going to pirate my stuff, that's not a lost sale to me - that person was never going to buy it," Skarka said. "It's such a small niche market and hobby that gamers in general don't have a problem paying to patronize things they like."
Skarka's bread-and-butter sales come from short PDFs, some with as few as five pages, and commensurately low prices, at $1 or $2. That's something that doesn't really work in the print world, but is perfect for electronic distribution.
"The more we treat a PDF like a book, the less likely people are to get it," Skarka said. "You price it low enough that the consumer thinks of it as disposable."
The same move toward shorter fare is noticeable in another market where e-books have done better than average - romantic fiction. Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. publishes 120 to 140 romantic novels per month, all of which are also sold as e-books. But it's also started selling short stories exclusively as e-books, selling them for 89 cents.
E-book sales still make up less than 1 percent of Harlequin's sales, according to Malle Vallik, the company's director of digital content. She wouldn't give a more specific figure.
Another publishing niche that Wieck believe could do well with e-publishing is comics. There's a huge back catalog that's out of print, and many comics readers are tech savvy. He started a site to sell electronic comics, but so far has had only minor publishers sign up. In November, Marvel Enterprises Inc., home of Spider-Man, launched a site that gives paying subscribers access to back copies, but won't let them download.
Wieck has also been helping another e-book site get off the ground, with products that are also reference materials, but otherwise about as far as you can get from "Dungeons & Dragons:" textbooks for homeschoolers.