Reading the blog post below, I wonder, would entire poetry collections available as downloads ever catch on or is the paper copy still a must?

blogs.guardian.co.uk/books

My ideal would be a website with complete or ongoing works by a wide range of poets. The visitor would come along, browse through the online poems, make a selection of the poems they want to buy and then order their very own selected works by poet X or an anthology of happy train poems, or whatever. They could choose whether they wanted the book in e-format or as a bound hardcopy (they could choose their own cover). The money they paid for the product could then (after production/delivery costs are recovered) be divided between the poets whose poems are selected.

Pretty much all the technology for this is already in place. But I doubt many poets would be willing to participate - they get very motherly over their manuscripts and don't like punters playing around with their vision, etc.

<He says provocatively>

A fantastic idea, Rik. Though I suppose one major drawback of selecting your very own Selected of a particular poet would be not choosing 'unknown' poems and so potentially missing out on some of the felicitous collisions and comparisons that occur when a poet - or knowledgeable editor - puts together a Selected. Sometimes those less well-known poems turn out to be personal favourites.

I put the whole of Fire Stations on my web site as a downloadable PDF
last year, kept it there for a few months, figuring it wasn't going to harm
sales ... since sales had been nil for the previous couple of years.

Thought better of it, though, and it's now reduced to a selection.

I covered this issue in my MSc dissertation on web publishing back in 2000 as well:
in certain sectors (e.g. scientific / engineering publishing), publishing the entire book
online increased sales of the print version. I suspect because they were quite
expensive books to buy, and it gave people a chance to browse the contents before
shelling out for a hard copy.

Given that no one in their right mind will read a novel online (given the fundamental
differences in how the eye relates to screen text and print text) I can't see how this
would diminish sales of the print copy at all. You're always going to want to read a book,
so the online version can only act as a hook for potential print sales, not a viable
alternative.

As for the e-book, this 'exciting new concept' has been kicking about for almost
8 years now, and still no one's really buying into it -- with the exception of reference
purposes, where all you need is to check a fact, figure or quote. For complete
page-to-page reading, it's pretty much useless.

Having said all that, poetry is one of the few forms to which it's suited, being (often)
so bite-sized and short. Mini points of reference.

My experience with Government publications tells a similar story - placing a copy of a document on the website would increase the actual sales of the book. I think the main reason for this was that until people saw the book on the website they didn't even know it existed; once they knew it was available, then they'd be more willing to purchase a copy.

But I don't think poems or novels fall into the same class as government publications - nobody would buy a government publication for a spot of light reading, would they? (Though in my view some GPs ought to be classified as fiction).

Are poems 'light reading'? :huh:

We get around 1,200 book visits a month to our online Google hosted ebook service, each visit varies in nature, academic books do far better in terms of immersive reading online, some individuals reading over 200 pages. I've seen no step up in sales. We see it as the equivalent of browsing in a shop, but I can't link our sales increase to this service. I remain deeply sceptical of it all. Probably the best thing to read, though it is by nature already out of data, is the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers research report, "E-Book Platforms and Aggregators: An Evaluation of Available Options for Publishers". I confess some degree of self-interest as it was written by our director Linda Bennett.

I think it's available from ALPSP at http://alpsp.org

I consider the internet an indispensable marketing and sales tool for publishers / promoters. Ie. it's a great way to provoke people to make a real world action, like buying a physical product. But I wouldn't want to read a book online, for free or otherwise, unless it was very specific or professional - eg. academic book. Single poems are different, which is why *good* online literary magazines work. Many don't, of course, and should stick to the A5 photocopied format!

I dont see the future of publishing as being online distribution. Here's an example of why:

http://www.4degreez.com/poetry/index.mv

I don't want to single out just a few hundred, er, poets in the sea of several million online po-posters. What Stephen Page called the "effluent of abundance", but there are already tens of thousands of e-books of "poetry" swimming around out there.

I do think Tom's right that some online magazines present something special, Jacket springs to mind, and Limelight! But John at Jacket personally subsidises himself to allow him to devote his time to the magazine. Making a good offer is partly a question of judgement (quality) and partly a question of time.

But browsing and Web hits do not necessarily constitute a real readership. I've wondered if most people visiting publishers' and magazines' Web sites are purely looking for how to submit. (The submission page is currently the fourth most popular page on our site.)

I'm not sure that people can experience the same emotional resonance with a text on screen as they can with a book. There's something magical about books that I just don't think we can replicate in an ebook. And as for Amazon's Kindle! I think it's like a reading prophylactic.