The July/August edition of Book Business Magazine has the results of a survey of 261 publishers (including 145 book publishers) done in
May by InfoTrends and the North American Publishing Company (Book
Business' parent) about their adoption of digital media and approach
to digital production and distribution. Some of the results are
surprising; here's a summary:
- PDF was the format of choice for 76% of the book publishers,
followed by EPUB, with 68%.
- The top priority for eBook production and distribution at the book
publishers was improving the overall user experience, cited by 60.3%
of respondents, followed by improving overall design and typography
(54.9%) and incorporating embedded rich media (44.4%). Only 20.6%
planned to add search capabilities, and features such as embedded
social media and sharing capabilities; improving footnotes and
references functionality; and enabling reader annotations and
highlighting were all named by less than 20% of publishers.
- The Amazon Kindle was the most popular device that book publishers
use to test their eBooks, cited by 39.7% of respondents, followed by
Apple's iOS devices (34.9%), Barnes & Noble's Nook (25.4%) and
Amazon's Kindle Fire (22.2%).
- Surprisingly, 30.2% of respondents said that they don't test or
tune their eBooks for specific mobile devices, which may explain why
so many eBooks look so bad on mobile devices, and 13.5% of
respondents don't know which devices (if any) their company tests
eBooks on.
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