E-Book Revolution?

I wrote this for my own blog but thought I would share with Make Mine Mystery.

It's amazing to me that people want to call what is going on an e-book revolution.

E-books have been around for a long, long time. When I was first published as an e-author the only way to read my books was on a computer.

Next came the Rocket E-Reader--a wonderful device. It was back-lit, you could download books from e-publishers (there were and are lots of them), and it shut off if you didn't turn a page for a long while. Perfect for reading in bed. Unfortunately, the sold out to Sony, who didn't come out with a new e-reader for a long time, and in my opinion, wasn't nearly as good as the old Rocket.

Other readers came along in-between and after, but the first to really take off--as everyone knows--was Amazon's Kindle.

New York publishers took awhile, but they finally saw the hand-writing on the wall and included e-rights in their contracts and hung onto a much greater percentage for themselves then any of the e-publishers do with their authors.

Dorchester/Leisure Books recently announced they now will only print POD books (standing for Print on Demand which is just a printing process which allows the publisher to only publish what is needed) and electronic books. Some say they are going this route because of financial problems--authors are gossiping about the fact that royalties are not being paid on time. How much is true, I have no idea.

Things are definitely changing in the publishing world--but they have been for a long, long time. Good changes for the author, in that we can now send queries and whole manuscripts in as attachments and receive out contracts the same way. When I get royalties from my publishers it's spelled out exactly where the sale came from: print book from a book store, Amazon, or the publishers' website; e-book from Amazon or other e-book seller or the publishers' website.

And of course, many authors are submitting their work directly to Amazon.

Do I still read paper books? Yes. Do I have a Kindle? Yes. Do I miss the smell of a book when I'm reading my Kindle? No. As far as I'm concerned, a book is a book.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com/

E-Readers by Christine Duncan

My daughter came to visit last week. Before she visited, she made sure to tell me that she had downloaded my book, Safe House to her iPhone. She liked the idea of having a book in her pocket, in case she got stuck somewhere boring. I was interested to hear that it was that aspect of e-books that she liked.
I like that too. But I also like the ability to bump up the font to make it easier to read. I don't know why someone doesn't market an e-reader specifically to those of us who are freakin' blind. The fact that e-books are usually cheaper doesn't hurt either.
I don't believe that the iPhone is the e-reader all of us have been waiting for. It's too expensive. Unfortunately, I don't think it's the new iPad either. But these things get people thinking. They start the process.
But as I told someone the other day, I'll know the e-reader has finally arrived when I can borrow one from the library, already loaded with the book to read, just as I can now with the Playaway audio players. Until then, I'll download to my little iPaq and dream.