New Street banks on growth in e-publishing industry

The day may come – and it is quickly approaching, say some – when books, be they hardcover or paperback, will be remnants of the past, collected by a few eccentrics or preserved by antique lovers. Eventually, most people likely will do their book-reading online or with the assistance of e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
New Street Communications LLC, an e-publishing company that opened in May in the Wickford section of North Kingstown, isn’t wasting time waiting for that day to begin positioning itself in the marketplace.
“We are rapidly getting into the time when the e-book is going to become the dominant print media,” said author Edward J. Renehan Jr., managing director of New Street.
The new business is concentrating solely on newly written nonfiction works by nationally known authors, rather than reprints of existing books, and is publishing only digital books. E-books can be printed to order.
The company will publish its first offerings in the fall, four e-books on topics that include Ernest Hemingway’s “Paris,” the lost nature writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and micro-entrepreneurship. Five more e-books are slated for release in the winter on topics ranging from scientific writing and the concept of transparency to venture-capital investing and Mount Monadnock.
As evidenced by these titles, New Street is focusing on these topics: the intersection of digital technology and society; transformative business communication and innovation; environmental issues; the life of Ernest Hemingway; and the lives of the New England transcendentalists.
“Our plan,” Renehan said, “is to develop a reputation in special-subject niches.”
The author of 18 books (published as traditional volumes rather than e-books) dating back to at least 1980, Renehan came to Rhode Island to be with his family in 1994, after 14 years working in editorial-product development for such companies as Oxford University Press, Doubleday, Springer-Verlag and St. Martin’s Press.
After 1994, he spent his time primarily writing nonfiction books. But all along, he said, he kept an eye on the brave new world of e-publication.
Electronic books showed “explosive growth” in the Association of American Publishers monthly sales report for June, according to an Aug. 20 article in Publishers Weekly.
In that month, gross e-books sales were $29.9 million, an increase of 118.9 percent over the $13.7 million in sales reported for the same period in 2009. For the first six months of the 2010 calendar year, gross e-book sales were at $180 million, a 203.8 percent increase over the $59.2 million in sales reported for the same time a year ago. Random House Inc., the world’s largest English language trade publisher, predicts that the switch-over to e-books as the primary print media will happen within the next four years, according to Renehan.
Digital publishing “has dramatically lowered the cost of entry” into the field, he noted, because there is no need for such expensive traditional necessities as printing presses, delivery trucks and warehouses, nor any need to print thousands of advanced copies. So a book that may promise limited sales of only 2,000 to 3,000 copies has a better chance of being e-published because “the cost of distribution is minimized,” he said. “This opens up the playing field to a lot of new enterprises.”
Cost of e-books range from $5.95 to $9.95, Renehan said, while published reports say average price for an e-reader is $150. For those who insist on having a real book in hand, e-books can be printed on demand, “with beautiful covers and everything,” Renehan said, at about the same price as traditional books.
Although he believes that the ultimate switch to e-publications is “inevitable,” Robert Utter, co-owner of the Other Tiger, an independent book store in Westerly, and former owner and editor of The Westerly Sun, raised a number of concerns, first and foremost the “big moral issue” of intellectual property rights on the Internet.
Utter acknowledged that e-reader devices are “cool” with “lots of great features,” but the gizmos do not interest him one whit. “They bore me,” he said.
The entire field of e-publication, from property rights to better e-readers, needs to evolve further “before we’re really comfortable with it,” he suggested.
And, in spite of “explosive growth,”
e-publication remains only “a tiny part” of the nation’s $24 billion book market, Utter said.
As is the case with almost every transition to computer-based services, Utter said those who rely on e-publication and e-books will miss out on the camaraderie that develops among bookstore patrons and owners. “It’s a very personal experience,” he said of reading. •