Ebooks: saviour or destroyer?

BY CHARLOTTE HARPER in The Canberra Times

22 Jul, 2011 12:00 PM

When O’Connor public servant Steven Tein and his business partner Clayton Wehner launched the Booku ebookstore, they expected to make a loss for at least the first nine to 12 months.But the business, which 41-year-old Tein co-runs part-time from the granny flat behind his family home, made a profit in its first month and has been growing steadily ever since.
‘‘It caught us off guard, how successful it’s been,’’ Tein says.
Now, less than six months after launch, it’s breathing down the neck of its print book sibling, Boomerang Books. Boomerang sells 2.4 physical books to every one Booku ebook sold. Tein, who became involved with Boomerang in 2006 with a long term view to developing an ebook platform as well, expects to see sales parity between the sites soon.
Booku is one of three Australian ebook start-ups providing some serious competition to the multinational giants like Amazon, Apple and Google in this country’s fast-growing digital bookselling market. The others are ReadCloud and Booki.sh, both of which are working with independent booksellers on ebook platforms. All three are run by teams of two.
They’ve joined a rapidly changing industry. Current estimates put the ebook share of the overall trade or general book market in the United States at 10 per cent. Australia is a couple of years behind, due in part to the late arrival here of key ereading devices like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, but the ebook share has risen to as high as 4 per cent here already, one publisher estimates.
Advertising agency Grey’s annual mood survey Eye on Canberra, issued this month, found that 12 per cent of those polled think paper books will have all but disappeared in 10 years, and more than half would consider buying ebooks.
Adelaide-based Wehner, who will address this year’s Australian Booksellers Association conference in Melbourne on Monday, first invited Tein to work with him on Boomerang Books after learning of his experience in business and government ecommerce.