E-books precede paper editions
Pantheon Publishing will release a electronic edition of its forthcoming book, House of Leaves. The publisher will be releasing the book in instalments on the of House of Leaves via iUniverse. The book will appear gratis on the site of iUniverse's Daily magazine in nine instalments from February 15 to March 17. When that ends, the book will migrate to the author's own site as Pantheon comes out with a limited-edition hardback and standard trade paper version.
The book is a 734-page first novel from Mark Z. Danielewski about a labrynthian house in Virginia. "Danielewski's novel is a celebration of the book as object." With a blurb like that, one wonders why it is being released as an electronic book. Pantheon publicity director Sophie Cottrell says this about the book. "This book is so visual and has such a cinematic sensibility," she said. "So I don't think we have to worry that people will get enough of this on-line and not want to go to a bookstore. They'll only want it more."
The idea of this is to introduce the reader to the book and then show them that there is a great deal more to a book than the words and the story. It seems that Pantheon is confident enough about the book's physical quality that giving away the content for free on the web will only induce people to own a physical copy of the book when it becomes available.
This is just another example of how print publishers are using the electronic edition to drive sales of print books. So far 600 copies of the introduction have been downloaded.
This week another Brick & Mortar giant has started to sell e-books on its web site. Borders.com started selling e-books for the PDAs, PCs and the SoftBook ReaderT. PDA editions are from the PeanutPress.com catalogue, PC editions are from the ReadsLikeABook.com catalogue. Borders.com established an eBook Boutique on site, wttp://go.borders.com/ebooks/index.xcv.
Surfing the Canadian giant bookseller, Chapters' web site, Chapters.com has not turned up any e-books yet, although the bookseller said it would be offering e-books in February. A recent press release from Chapters states that its first issue of e-books will be its catalogue of over 200 Coles Notes, the Canadian equivalent of Cliff's Notes. These will converted to electronic format and sold via the web site. The print editions of the these retail for around four or five dollars. I wonder what the thinking is here. There is more information on the web about Hamlet and Steinbeck than is available in Coles or
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