E-books on Board: Independent E-book Retailing
By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 9/2/2009 7:56:00 AM
Business is good, said Bob LiVolsi, founder of Books on Board, a two-year-old independent e-book retailer based in Austin, Tex. Despite a relatively short time in business, Books on Board has grown into one of the largest independent e-book retailers in the country, offering more than 400,000 e-book titles.A former technology executive at Hewlett Packard, LiVolsi founded Books on Board after becoming frustrated at the limited number of places he could buy e-books for himself. “I was an avid e-book reader and bought my e-books from B&N until B&N and Amazon both dropped e-books,” said LiVolsi. “It broke my heart.”
After looking around for other e-book retailers, LiVolsi decided he would have to "do it myself,” and started his own e-book store. Nearly three years later, both B&N and Amazon are back in the e-book business, and e-book sales are growing fast. LiVolsi said sales at Books on Board are growing 12% a month.
Books on Board has about 14 full-time and part-time employees, said LiVolsi, and is a member of the American Booksellers Association and the International Digital Publishers Forum. Books on Board’s profile has been rising quickly, and the store was featured at Sony’s recent launch of its new line of digital readers in New York, in an effort to highlight the role of independent e-book retailers in the digital reading marketplace.
Most of the 400,000 titles BoB offers come with digital rights management software, but LiVolsi has embraced the ePub standard, and the site offers e-books in a variety of formats including Microsoft Reader, eReader, MobiPocket, Adobe and others. The site sells devices as well as e-books, and LiVolsi has sold Sony devices since late 2008.
“Wireless devices are where the market is going,” said LiVolsi, taking note of Sony’s Daily Edition, the company’s new wireless reader. LiVolsi also sells a European-produced device called Cybook, a nonwireless reader that sells for $249 and supports ePub and Adobe PDF. “The price of devices is important,” said LiVolsi. “Women seem to love the Cybook."
LiVolsi says the current e-book market is getting better at “listening to the consumer” and providing devices as well as formats like ePub that make it easier to attract consumers new to digital reading. And he points out that despite the growing popularity of dedicated digital readers like the Sony Reader, the Cybook or even the iPhone, 60% of Books on Board customers download their e-books to their personal computers to read. He said about 20% use dedicated reading devices and about 15% use mobile devices and phones. And the use of Netbooks, small laptops with full computing functionality, is also growing quickly.
Indeed, while he acknowledged the appeal of nonbacklit e-ink display devices like the Sony or the Kindle, LiVolsi said backlit LCD screens (used on PCs and Netbooks) are very popular among his customers. The reason? “You don’t need a lamp,” said LiVolsi. “Most of my customers want to read in bed.”
