Options for selling e-books now

We can stop talking about e-books as something new to bookselling in New Zealand.  They are here and have been ever since Whitcoulls introduced their offering through Kobo last year. 

What’s new is the sudden arrival, or near arrival, of a number of options for the wider kiwi bookselling community to offer e-books to their customers.

Established bookshop management software providers, Circle Software and Barcode/eBility have announced e-book sales management additions to their existing platforms, and ReadCloud from Australia is also signing up Kiwi booksellers to its system.

Title Page to be kiwi-ised
A further important step in the digitisation of New Zealand bookselling industry came last week with the announcement from the Australian Publishers Association and THORPE-Bowker of a consolidated “Book Industry Supply Chain Solution”, which will combine the price and availability program, Title Page with bibliographic, e-commerce and other technological facilities provided by Thorpe Bowker. 

Title Page itself is to be “kiwi-ised” with NZ dollar prices and local availability information. Read the full statement.

There is a lot for the APA and THORPE-Bowker to work though with a completion date for the new arrangement planned for around November this year – although part of the new structure may be available sooner.

The new Title Page/THORPE-Bowker offering will enable booksellers to link with e-book software systems and The Read is aware of are a number of commercial discussions underway to that will allow booksellers to engage in more efficient supply chain systems for both printed books and e-books right down to point of sale and delivery.

White label services
ReadCloud has been developed in Australia with services originally aimed at schools.  However, they have developed an e-book/e-commerce platform to allow booksellers that can be linked to booksellers own website sites on a white label basis. 

The ReadCloud system was demonstrated at the Booksellers NZ Business Day following the annual conference in July. ReadCloud will enable booksellers to brand their own e-book offering to their customers who wish to access their books at any time through a variety of devices. ReadCloud  are signing up booksellers in both Australia and New Zealand to their new system which they intend to launch on 1 October (see ReadCloud PDF attached below). 

ReadCloud also offer an e-reader which booksellers can on-sell.

A proof of concept of the new Circle bookshop management system was demonstrated to Circle Software’s customers at the fringe event prior to the Booksellers NZ annual conference. Read more about this.

Circle describe their new system as a “breakthrough in selling e-books”. They too will offer the system on a white label basis which booksellers can make available to their customers through their own branded websites. 

Page and Blackmore in Nelson are currently running a trial of Circle's new e-book system on their website (see above).

The system is integrated to the existing printed books stock management system which includes a full e-commerce suite.  Circle are seeking expressions of interest in the concept from bookshops before rolling it out.

An integrated e-book and printed book, white label web based service will also be available “soon” from Barcode in Australia , proprietors of e-Bility/e-Web bookshop management system.
(See E-WEB PDF below). 

The system links to publishers and distributors enabling booksellers to sell printed books and e-books on the same platform using the built-in “pricing matrix engine” allowing discounting and the ability to price competitively. Thus existing users of e-Bility will be able to add e-book selling to their existing websites.

e-readers being sought
All of this activity presents Boooksellers NZ members with options, which they can now exploit to get into selling of e-books. 

The Read is also aware of work being done to identify sources of reliable e-readers than can be on-sold through bookshops in addition to the Kobo e-reader available from Whitcoulls.  Many bookshop owners do not want to leave it to the electronic retailers to be the sole providers of e-readers.

It will be interesting to see the take up of e-books within the New Zealand market. 

Certainly in the United States and the UK sales of e-books have taken a major share of the market, mostly through Amazon’s kindle and Barnes and Noble’s nook. 

Sales of e-books being offered by independent bookstores through the strategic alliance that the American Booksellers Assn has with Google have been slow but bookshops are working hard at devising marketing strategies that suit the technologies. 

The Read also understands that work is being done by the ABA to identify a e-reader that can be sold by independent bookshops to add to the customer service being offered.

One thing is clear from the American experience, bricks and mortar stores have a major part to play in selling e-books just as much as p-books because of the curatorial  service that they can provide. 

There is as much in providing valuable information and the value of hand selling with e-books as with p-books.  Customers want to know, they want advice about what books will meet their needs just as much in the new e-environment as before.

An issue will be how fast the various system providers can attract publishers to sell their e-books through the new systems.  The APA/THORPE-Bowker deal is pushing into the market from the publisher side by providing a platform that retail system developers can link into.  On the other hand, the new e-systems from Circle, e-Web and ReadCloud provide opportunity for publishers to provide their digital output directly.  

Whether it is publishers “pushing” e-books, or bookshops “pulling” them from publishers with the new retail systems that are available, it is apparent that New Zealand bookshops now have multiple opportunities to engage fully in providing e-books to their customers.

Article written by Booksellers NZ CEO Lincoln Gould.