Overreacting Against eBooks

Navigating in New Media is much like flying an airplane. Unless you’re experienced with these media’s vagarities and business cycles, you tend to overreact and make problems worse. Porpoising is what pilots call those overreactions, which aim too high or too low, rather than a steady course. When the Internet Bubble burst, too many fickle executives of media corporates overreacted by either cutting their New Media operations too much or cutting their own overreaching expectations too little.

Barnes&Noble.com was one of the latter. Last week, we mentioned that B&N.com had hyperbolic eBook sales expectations during the Internet Bubble and hadn’t adjusted its expectations in light of post-Bubble realities. The result was B&N.com’s eBook sales never reached its own hyperbolic expectations, so B&N last week further overreacted by quitting the eBook business.

Too bad for B&N.com. Publishers Weekly reports that eBook sales from other vendors are up 30 percent this year. The Open eBook Forum (OeBF) — a trade group that includes Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley & Sons, AOL TimeWarner Books, McGraw-Hill, Random House, Simon & Shuster, and B&N.com itself — reports a 40 percentincrease. The OeBF reports that 660,991 e-books were sold in the first half of 2003 and that revenues during that time were $5 million. The OeBF predicts sales of more than $10 million for the full year 2003.

An industry that’s growing at 30 to 40 percent annually, particularly during a severe recession, is a healthy business. Too bad that B&N.com had set expectations far more extreme, then overreacted. Many pundits who’ve never examined the actual sales figures think that B&N.com no longer selling eBook is a sign that the eBook market has failed. Don’t place them at the controls of your New Media business plan.

One Reply to “Overreacting Against eBooks”

Ebook counterpoint

Whilst looking at the Crosbie’s main blog, I saw this article about Barnes and Noble leaving the ebook business. Unlike every other thing I’ve seen on this subject he points out that the “failure of their ebook business” was actually a function of thei…

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What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.