This Oct. 27, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the razzle-dazzle of mobile and tablet apps when we think about new products, audiences and revenue opportunities but, we shouldn’t neglect or ignore the potential that e-books can offer also. Apps are great for providing utility and new technical products and functionality and e-books can compliment that by leveraging our core strength or what Jim Collins calls the “Hedgehog concept” in his book “Good to Great” by creating accurate, detailed, engaging local narrative content. E-books offer us the opportunity to repackage and resell a lot of our deep and valuable information in a digital format for rabid readers.

The Kindle platform, which works on just about every mobile, tablet or computer device, is especially intriguing, including their special category of “Kindle Singles” which Wired writer Charlie Sorrel described as, “one-off pieces of non-fiction and journalism which are typically much shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article.” The content can vary largely from single long-form narrative articles to combining a series of columns from a popular columnists into one digital document, or even a full-fledged narrative book built around a local topic, person/team or issue in the area (from the local mysterious murder case to the local team’s Cinderella climb to the championship).

Here are a handful of reasons why we should take a closer look at e-books and Kindle Singles for spreading our content:

• E-books enable and create rabid reading habits, like crack addicts. The Wall Street Journal sites a study that says 40 percent of e-reader owners said they read more now than they did with print books. Anecdotally, I know this is true with myself and people I know who use e-readers, but even beyond e-reader users, the ability to always pick up any book I’m currently reading at at my current place on my phone, computer or tablet in any idle-time moment really helps feed a bibliophile’s addiction.
• E-books are continuing to grow (up 153 percent in the past year). This will only grow exponentially as Amazon is launching the Kindle Fire tablet, the first what some are calling a serious competitor to the iPad. Their OS software is modified to showcase and feature your media content including books and movies. Amazon is actually selling the Kindle Fire at about a $10 loss per unit, hedging that the users will buy so many digital goods through them that they’ll make up the difference. Read Write Web declared eBooks as one of the top trends of 2010, pointing out: “At the end of October Amazon announced that for its top 10 best-selling books, customers bought the Kindle edition twice as often as the print copy. According to Amazon’s VP for Kindle, Steve Kessel, Kindle eBook sales also topped print sales of hardcovers and paperbacks for its top 25, top 100 and top 1,000 bestsellers.” Even the traditional university book presses are starting to publish ‘singles’ to take advantage of this new market and technology.
• Potential audiences are huge; rather than just creating content for desktop users, or iPad or iPhone users, Kindle singles and e-books are available on almost all platforms so the potential audience is much larger.
• Revenue can be substantially larger. Robert Niles illustrates this perfectly on the Online Journalism Review:

Here’s why you should consider amplifying your investment in eBook development. Here are the prices of the top 20 paid apps in the iOS app store, as of last night:

$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$2.99
$0.99
$0.99
$1.99
$1.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99

Now, here are the prices of the top 20 paid eBooks in Apple’s iBooks store, for comparison:

$9.99
$14.99
$12.99
$2.99
$12.99
$12.99
$0.99
$9.99
$12.99
$1.99
$12.99
$11.99
$14.99
$14.99
$12.99
$3.99
$14.99
$9.99
$12.99
$14.99

In which market would you rather try to make money?

Let’s sharpen the focus a bit. In the News category in the app store, most expensive paid app in the top 20 is Instapaper at $4.99. There is no News category in the iBooks store, but let’s use Politics & Current Events as the closest approximation. Of the top 20 paid eBooks in that category, 19 of the top 20 sell for $4.99 or more.

Clearly, the public is willing to – and does – pay more for content in eBooks than it does in apps. That fact should encourage any serious news business to take a serious look at eBooks.

• E-reader owners also tend to be regular newspaper readers according to Scarborough Research, so they’re familiar with and trust our content and brands. So they will be easier to market new e-book products to through our existing properties.
• E-books can help reach and target different audiences, a recent consumer research survey of 26,000 respondents found that women are 52 percent more likely than men to own an e-reader, and men are 24 percent more likely than women to own a tablet.
• Save on publishing costs compared to traditional book publishing. Rather than having to go though book publishers for all the raw materials, e-books don’t cost any glue, paper or ink and depending on your product price, with Kindle eBooks up to 70% of the cost can go straight to the author/publisher.  (Apple’s iBook store is another option, but it is much more restrictive, requiring an ISBN number for the book, which can cost more than a hundred dollars to register.)
• Incredibly simple publishing process. Any block of text has the potential to become an e-book. The Kindle store can take formats from PDF, to Word Document, to ePub, to HTML and more. So any series of articles, or even a big Sunday feature story could be turned into a Kindle Single.
• Added functionality and sharing are growing user benefits, from book sharing to note-taking and sharing to Amazon’s new HTML5-based format that allows for much more design and interactivity in e-books.

Here’s a handful of media organizations that have started to experiment with E-Books and Kindle Singles for various content types:

• The Guardian has started offering Kindle e-book “Shorts” from some of their series/issue coverage, including breaking the News Corp phone hacking scandal for £2.29
• The Chicago Tribune published the “Chicago Bears 2011″ which is literally a series of their training camp articles organized into topics for The Monsters of the Midway.
• Ars Technica sold a 19-page, $5 Kindle e-book of their OS X 10.7 Lion review, and eclipsed 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours of the sale (Thanks to Chris Keller for the tip!)
• The Boston Globe produced a series of books about historical crime and gangsters from their region, the most recent about Whitey Bulger.
• The Washington Post created a $2.99 e-book about The Hunt for Bin Laden after his capture