Yesterday afternoon it was nearly impossible to log on to the electronic books section of Barnesandnoble.com.
That's because the Simon & Schuster e-book Star Trek: S.C.E.: The Belly of the Beast premiered on Barnesandnoble.com's
"e-books" section, along with e-book versions of previously published titles, including the Jackie Collins bestseller Lethal Seduction and Jerry Stiller's Married to Laughter.
Wisely, the publisher timed the release of its e-books with the debut of the Microsoft
Reader software, which lets consumers download and read the digital text of an e-book.
Initially these books will be distributed only in the Microsoft format so that Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom
Microsoft is currently giving the Reader away for free at Bn.com, while Simon &
Schuster is selling the first 20,000 copies of The Belly of the Beast for just $1.
That e-book is supposed to retail for $5.
Bn.com's overloaded servers are reminiscent of Simon & Schuster's first e-book endeavor. Last March the publisher released Stephen King's digital novella Riding the Bullet to huge fanfare.
So far there have been 535,000 downloads of the title. Bullet retailed for $2.50, but many copies were given away free as a promotion, and there were reports that the book was also pirated. "That was the most successful e-book ever," says Keith Titan, director of electronic business development for Simon & Schuster Online.
All of Simon & Schuster's fuss over e-books says less about the promise of electronic publishing than about the public's hunger for free or deeply discounted products, according to Jupiter Communications analyst Billy Pidgeon. "Ask [Simon & Schuster] how many copies of the King e-book it sold for the retail price of $2.50," says Pidgeon. He says a good proportion of those 535,000 copies were obtained for free. "People always want free stuff," he says.
The bottom line, says the analyst: "Fiction e-books are futuristic, but they're also a great way to get press. The only way to market e-books is to give them away, because it's still such a novelty."
Nevertheless, Simon & Schuster recently released the entire backlist of best-selling suspense author Mary Higgins Clark--23 titles--in electronic format. And last month the company announced a deal with Lightning Source, which will handle all of the publisher's digital fulfillment services. "Eventually this will enable us to offer all 12,000 titles on our list electronically," says Titan.
For now, however, Simon & Schuster's e-book strategy is less a business than an early effort to establish market leadership. "They're thinking about future distribution platforms, and they're a little scared of being replaced by new digital distributors," says Pidgeon. "They're doing this themselves because they're afraid of someone else doing it first."
Perhaps the lesson of Amazon's