On February 7, the American Book Producers Association sponsored a session on “The Business of E-readers” with Lisa Faith Phillips, director of digital strategy and development at Hachette Book Group. The event was attended by publishers, designers, and editors, and Phillips provided insight into where e-reading is heading.
The influence of e-reading is affecting all aspects of the book business, including cover design and acquisition strategy. For the former, Phillips said now Hachette always considers e-books (and the various platform displays) when designing a book cover and that they’ve even designed a few covers specifically for e-book titles. The problem with covers on digital devices, Phillips conceded, is many times they’re scaled down to thumbnail size. For acquisition strategy, Philips said that now (especially in her case since Grand Central launched its e-romance imprint Forever Yours) publishers must consider the option of publishing an author in e-book form only, and then moving into physical from there if the title finds success as an e-book.
One of the issues highlighted during the session included the difficulty of securing and paying for rights for backlist titles. Phillips said Hachette could create a high-quality e-book for about $1,500, but that locking down rights for backlist titles was complex and expensive. Another issue, specifically for illustrated books, will be finding a way to limit the file size—accommodating art and multimedia capabilities will take huge amounts of space and consumers might be wary about downloading such big files, an issue already facing some e-magazines.
Phillips also touched on Apple’s move into textbooks and self-publishing, and was particularly impressed by the easy, intuitive authoring software for self publishing.
