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NEWS and FEATURES related to ASME Press book publishing...
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Coming in 2012 - Sharepoint document sharing and collaboration tools in development for ASME Publishing - check back for updates!
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From June 2010: Digital vs Print Books: The Hard Truth (With a Silver Lining)
We’ve all heard about record sales of the Harry Potter books and “The DaVinci Code,” but those books are anomalies rather than the norm. The hard truth is that printed book sales have been spiraling downward for years now.
As recently as ten years ago, here at ASME we were printing a minimum of 1500-2000 copies of every new book. Hundreds of technical and academic libraries would literally purchase every book we published.
But with continued budget cuts in education, and increasing use of Internet resources over print, average sales per book have fallen to the point where we are printing only 500 copies of each new book.
(I was at a publishers' conference last month where someone from a university press admitted they were only printing 300-400 of their new books, so I know it is not just us.)
The good news is that online "eBook" sales are just starting to take off, and we are planning over 100 eBooks for our online "digital library" by the end of 2010 (www.asmedl.org). We've had excellent sales growth of our online technical journals over the past few years, particularly internationally, and we have great expectations for our eBook sales as well.
Preliminary research has shown that eBook customers tend to pay less for each eBook, but fortunately they also tend to buy more titles, probably because of the convenience and the impulse-purchasing factor.
Personally, I have only purchased a handful of printed books in the past year (mostly as gifts), but I have purchased more than 30 eBooks for my Kindle in the same time period. So I can attest to this trend.
Those of us on the front lines of book publishing are cautiously hopeful that the popularity of digital content, delivered through the web both to desktops and mobile devices, will continue to grow, and that books will not go the way of the dinosaur.
Stay tuned…
--Manager, Books, ASME Press (June, 2010)
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Upcoming Events
July 19-22, 2011
CESSE - Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives
Vancouver, BC
September 20-22, 2011
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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
November, 2011
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Denver, CO
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