Random House, who is the world’s biggest book publisher, expects E-Books to generate 10% of the company’s overall revenue by next year, the CEO has recently divulged.
Chief Executive of Random House Markus Dohle recently did an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel that e-book revenue had already jumped to 8 percent of the companies overall sales in the United States. Random Houses stars that contributed to the sales spike were Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stieg Larsson.
“We’re at 8 percent in the United States currently, it rose by leaps and bounds,” Dohle told Der Spiegel. “I could well imagine that we get beyond 10 percent next year,” he said. He added that he did not expect e-books to generally overtake printed books in the next five years. But he did say that ebooks by 2015 will account for 25 to 50% of total sales.
Random House is turning a blind eye right now to Apple’s iPad because Dohle said he was not sure about Apple’s model which forces publishers to determine the end-consumer price, unlike for printed books which are priced by retailers.
“We’ve got to think very hard about whether we want this drastic change in our business model,” he said. “The question is if publishers know how to find the right retail price… This hasn’t been our job in the past.”
via Reuters
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
