As I wandered from booth to booth at an author bookselling event over the weekend, I asked about e-book availability. To my amazement, I got a whole lot of blank looks. I wondered: How could this be?
As a professional in the SEO, online marketing and eBook marketing and publishing business, I live in a world of e-marketing and techie gadgets, eReaders among them. I admit, too: I like gadgets and I love holding a whole bookcase full of books in my hand – via Kindle.
A recent Publishers Weekly article assures me that I’m not alone. It reports that 21 percent of book buyers own an e-reading device (findings from a Codex Group survey). And the wave of e-reading interest is just beginning to hit the shores. Watch the coming months, says the survey, for great leaps in readers seeking out ebooks and moving away from paper.
The event I attended over the weekend was an excellent Oregon History Museum annual event with more than 40 authors, from new single-book authors to famous authors (Ursula K. LeGuin among them), all signing and selling their books. Some of the books looked to be perfect candidates for ebook publication. Delicious mysteries, inspiring memoirs, and histories. Some of the authors were self-published, which is a well-known common and logical spur to ebook publishing.
But were they e-published? The books that interested me were not.
“I’m a luddite,” said one author (sheepish grin) of fiction that caught my interest. I figured that meant he resisted ebook publishing. So, I walked on and got interested in another book – good shiver-me-timbers reading of historical, unsolved crimes by Phil Stanford. No ebooks there, either. Darn! (And further silent doggonits to that effect.)
I admit that we are still in the early days of e-publishing. In fact, we still have not decided on spelling: is it ePublishing? E-publishing? Or simply epublishing? E-books? Ebooks? Egads! Only the AP Stylebook knows for sure. That’s early days indeed.
But, I must tell you, the time has come. It’s time to get your books into e-reader format. Your readers are downloading books to their Kindles and Nooks and Droids and Pads. They await you. They plead.
Books Unfit for E-Reading
There were several beautiful books at the weekend event – coffee-table books with gorgeous photos, poetry and art. I didn’t ask those authors and artists (LeGuin among them) about ebook versions. Quite frankly, I don’t think I’m ready to look at art on an eReader. Probably not even on an iPad – I’m with the Luddites on that one – though I may be convinced otherwise one day.
