Thursday September 17, 2009

Fastest to a Thousand: 5 e-book sites anecdotally compared

While I didn’t get in as early as the sci-fi crowd, I was a relatively early adopter of e-books, both as a reader and distributor. I was reading Cory Doctorow and F. Scott Fitzgerald off an Audiovox SMT5600 long enough ago that I shocked publishing industry acquaintances simply by admitting I read this way. E-books were experiencing one of those periodic re-deaths they’ve undergone during the last 15 years, and publishers were happy to leave them dead.

I first published my own e-book—Single, a collection of two previously-published stories—in July 2006, and first posted it to a site other than my own two and a half years ago. I did this, on the one hand, to extend the lives of the stories. They had been published by nice, respectable journals—but even (and perhaps especially) nice, respectable journals have small runs and limited shelf-lives. On the Internet, meanwhile, you never know what could happen. A Bulgarian woman moving to Memphis (where you used to live) might turn a friend onto your blog. That friend, in turn, might turn another friend onto it, who might post something from it on Metafilter, where an editor from the New York Post might see it and pay you to re-print it. I believe in making work available and seeing what happens.

But I also posted it because I wanted to have a test balloon. In social media, especially, you’ve got to do it to get it. You’ve got to blog to understand that bloggers communicate with referrals. You’ve got to Twitter to understand how chips of ephemera become a mosaic of information and anecdote. I wanted to put out an e-book so I could see how that distribution channel flowed, like dropping a paper boat in a stream to see where it winds up.

Since then, I’ve posted Single to most major e-book sites as they’ve appeared on the scene and collected some information about how well it’s done on each. I’m putting out another small collection of previously published stories, Cassingle, next month, so I was thinking about where I should post it. Maybe this information will also help others decide where to post their own work. My unscientific analysis of five sites—in the order I found them—is after the jump. These results aren’t exemplary and are the result of ordinary promotion. Lots of e-books get many more downloads. Still, Single has been viewed 7,500 or so times as an e-book—more than the circulation of either One Story or the Land-Grant College Review, where the stories in it originally appeared.

Site: Manybooks.net
Uploaded: February 2007
Downloads to date: 500
Matthew McClintock deserves credit for being a pioneer in this area. Manybooks was the first place, other than Project Gutenberg, that I downloaded an e-book. What he did before anyone else was take the Gutenberg catalog and make it more accessible by offering every file in more than a dozen formats. (His solution is technically elegant as well, since the conversions are made on the fly as files are requested.) He also might post your creative commons e-book if you ask him nicely, which I did in February 2007. The site reset its counters at some point, which is why I’ve added about 200 downloads to the total you now see on the site. Downloads have been slow and steady, averaging a dozen or so a month. Still, those are downloads, not views. These users have actually decided to store the file locally and maybe it take it somewhere with them. (More about that in a second.) But I’d be interested to know how most people use Manybooks. My sense, based on online chatter, is that people mostly use it to download the classics and don’t necessarily browse it for contemporary work.

Site: Wattpad.com
Uploaded: April 2007
Views to date: 1,934
Wattpad started out as a Java app for mobile phones and has since expanded to include apps for Blackberry, Android, and iPhone. I didn’t like the user experience of the Java app and haven’t tried the others. I did upload Single there, however, and quickly racked up close to 2,000 views, although that number has remained pretty still for more than a year. I got a mention on the site’s blog shortly after I uploaded Single, which accounted for the bump, but now I must be buried deep in the catalog. Also—unlike Manybooks—this is the number of views, not downloads, so it’s difficult to determine how engaged users became with the book on Wattpad.

Site: Scribd.com
Uploaded: May 2008
Views/downloads to date: 3,258/29
Scribd.com nicely highlights the difference between views and downloads by tallying both. In the last 15 months, Single has been viewed there 3,258 times, but downloaded only 29. I’m happy to have my work viewed or downloaded, but it’s difficult to know what to make of Scribd’s numbers. On the one hand, that seems like a pretty low conversion rate, but then the site isn’t offering the book in an e-book format, per se, so why would anyone download it? Surely some people have read it—or part of it—on-screen. I just don’t know how many.

Site: Bookglutton.com
Uploaded: October 2008
“Viewloads” to date: 819
Travis Alber’s Bookglutton is based on the idea that talking about books is communal, so the site allows groups of users to read (and annotate) books together—like a virtual book group. This isn’t how I like to read—and I know you can also download the site’s catalog via Stanza and other apps—but the book group model is interesting. 819 users have opened Single on the site to date, and these “opens” are something more than views, but something less than downloads, engagement-wise. Call them “viewloads.” Users have to trigger a new window which opens an interactive reading environment to open a book, which requires more than stumbling across the page. My results, however, may not be typical. Travis was nice enough to make me featured author on the site pretty early on, so my book pops up on the frontpage once out of every ten loads or something like that. I don’t know how many views I’d have without that extra promotion.

Site: Feedbooks.com
Uploaded: March 2009
Downloads to date: 997
The title of this post comes from Feedbooks, since it is the site where Single will soon surpass a thousand downloads after a little more than six months—easily the fastest channel to cross that threshold. The site is simple and seems to have attracted a healthy community of self-publishers, many of whom have had even more success distributing work there. Plus it came on the scene at the perfect time, just as the Kindle was making e-publishing mainstream, so the site is hitting its stride right as e-books take off.

So where will I publish Cassingle when it’s ready? Feedbooks first, then Bookglutton—since my work has been featured there. But I’m open to suggestions. Any sites I’ve missed? Let me know.