Bertelsmann's Random House, the world's biggest book publisher, expects electronic books to contribute more than 10 percent of its U.S. revenue next year, its head was quoted as saying on Sunday.
Chief Executive Markus Dohle told German magazine Der Spiegel that e-book revenue had already jumped to 8 percent in the United States and had turned into a new growth driver for the publisher of 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.
"It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us," he says. "Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers."
Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: "I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn't come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they're writing about."
[Clip]
You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can't tell the consumer to go away. So we didn't participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it."
Article concludes with a brief CV for John Makinson.
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