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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