Last August, top executives from Microsoft,Barnesandnoble.com and several book publishers assembled at a Midtown Manhattan hotel for a news conference to usher in the coming age of the electronic book.
"We believe the e-book revolution will have an impact on the book industry as great as the paperback revolution of the 1960s," said Jack Romanos, president of the Simon & Schuster division of Viacom.
Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of the books division of AOL-Time Warner, pledged to lead the charge: "We want to see electronic publishing blow the covers off of books."
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Andersen Consulting had recently estimated that by 2005 digital books could account for 10 percent of all book sales.
A year later, however, the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying. Publishers and online bookstores say only the very few best-selling electronic editions have sold more than 1,000 copies, and most sell far fewer. Only a handful have generated enough revenue to cover the few hundred dollars it costs to convert their texts to digital formats.
"Perhaps we were too-early adapters," Kirshbaum said last week. "We were the early birds who went out to catch the early worms and there weren't very many."
Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, which commissioned the study by Andersen Consulting, now known as Accenture, acknowledged that its forecast now seems unrealistic. "That is going to be a stretch, to be honest," Schroeder said. "I think everybody has hit the pause button on e-books for the moment."
The tepid demand comes as no surprise to bibliophiles, since printed books still work just fine.
"If e-books were the only thing to buy in a quote-unquote bookstore, I would buy a lot fewer books," said Starling Lawrence, editor in chief of the publisher W.W. Norton & Co. "I am glad I will be dead by the time they take over the business."
But publishers and online booksellers have not yet lost faith. They say slow sales are caused by clumsy technology, along with high prices for ephemeral, purely digital editions. Some take heart from unexpected pockets of demand among such mainstream readers as devotees of paperback romance novels and thrillers.
The single great exception to the generally dismal sales record is Stephen King's electronic novella, Riding the Bullet.
It ignited last summer's wave of enthusiasm for electronic books, as hundreds of thousands of readers clogged computer servers to download copies, initially offered free. But nothing since then has even come close.
Still, Dick Brass, vice president for technology development at Microsoft and a prominent cheerleader for the cause, said he always warned that electronic books would not take off right away. Sales so far have met Microsoft's expectations, he said.
"I don't think anything we expected has failed to materialize. I always said it would be eight to 10 years before electronic publishing began to equal paper, and I am willing to live and die by those predictions," he said.
One problem is that technical snags have prevented millions of users of handheld personal computers operating Microsoft software from being able to read most publishers' electronic books.
Book publishers are counting on the portable computer as a more appealing way to read than the screen of a desktop monitor. But after watching the music industry's piracy problems, book publishers insisted that Microsoft add to its software for reading electronic books much stronger safeguards against unauthorized copying than today's handheld personal computers can accommodate. As a result, handheld computers using this software cannot display most publishers' books. (Devices using the Palm software can, making them the most popular way to read electronic books, despite eye-strain from their small screens.)
"I feel that was one of our greatest shortcomings," Brass said. He promised that the next generation of hand-held computers using a Microsoft operating system would be able to run the more secure software.
Sales of specialized handheld appliances designed only for reading electronic books have also disappointed both book publishers and their manufacturer, Thomson Multimedia, which began selling the devices under the RCA brand last holiday season.
David Arland, a spokesman for the company, declined to provide details, but he said that the sales were below expectations. Publishers estimate fewer than 40,000 of the RCA appliances are in use.
Consumers appeared confused, Arland said, because the devices are neither computers nor hand-held organizers, nor do they connect to the Internet. The appliances download electronic books over phone lines directly from a central server.
The device has been the kind of purchase people imagined someone else might enjoy. Two-thirds of the users received the devices as gifts, Arland said. The least expensive has a suggested retail price of about US$300.
Other anticipated benefits of electronic book publishing have been slow to develop. Last summer, John Kilcullen, chief executive of the publisher Hungry Minds, was among the first to trumpet the possibility that electronic books would enable consumers to create their own electronic editions by mixing and matching chapters. After delays for technological difficulties, Hungry Minds began offering its Frommer's travel guides, For Dummies how-to books and Cliffs Notes study guides in sections over the Internet this spring, available as either specially produced customized paperbacks or electronic books.
So far, Kilcullen said, nearly all of its few thousand electronic book sales have been for Cliffs Notes -- usually late on Sunday nights as Monday's school class deadlines approach.
However low their current sales, several publishers noted that some people do appear to be investigating electronic books. They have flocked to the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center, for example, which provides for free electronic editions of classic books. Between last August and mid-June, users downloaded more than 3 million copies of about 1,600 titles, from Alice in Wonderland to Macbeth. Arland, of Thomson Multimedia, said the company was surprised by the profile of its customers. Users of the RCA electronics are primarily men, but the users of the RCA electronic book reader are 70 percent women, perhaps reflecting Oprah Winfrey's endorsement during the last holiday season.
What is more, the most common place for using the device is not on the road but in bed, where two-thirds of customers use it. Arland said the most popular attribute of the devices is the back-lit screen, qualifying them as an expensive alternative to small lamps for reading in the dark while a bedmate sleeps.
Janice Goodfellow, a 47-year-old former office manager who lives in rural Michigan, said she usually reads about a half-dozen paperback thrillers and romance novels a week. But her home is about 120km from the nearest bookstore, in Novi, Michigan. She heard about e-books from a romance readers Web site.
So on a snowy winter's night two year ago she tried downloading a novel from a site, and she liked it. "I'm lazy and sometimes I don't want to drive," Goodfellow said. In the last year, she has read about 20 electronic books sitting at her desktop computer. "I'd buy all my books this way if they were available from major publishers and they weren't expensive."
But Goodfellow has not yet bought any from the major publishers' because they usually charge more than US$15 -- generally asking more for the electronic book than the paperback. Instead, she buys her electronic novels from a tiny startup called Hard Shell Word Factory, for about US$3 to US$6 each. She buys them for the same reasons she usually buys paperbacks instead of hardcovers: they are cheap, she can buy several at once, and she can throw them away when she is done. "Even if you buy a novel you are not loving, it is just three bucks," she said.
Mary Wolf, who owns Hard Shell Word Factory, based in Amherst Junction, Wisconsin, is one of the few electronic book publishers who says she is making a profit. With a staff of about a dozen, she relies mostly on submissions already rejected by the major publishers.
Hard Shell offers about 300 titles and sells about 6,000 electronic copies a month, more than half romance novels and most of the rest are suspense, science fiction, fantasy and Westerns, she said. It has sold about 8,000 copies of its best-selling romance, Eye of the Storm, by Kimberly Grey, about a divorced psychic in Albuquerque who falls in love with a homocide detective.
The major publishers all say they are continuing to introduce new electronic books, regardless of paltry sales so far. "We continue to get our books in line for the day when the market develops," said Romanos, of Simon & Schuster, who added that he never expected a fast start.
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