Dec 16 2009
About
This is where I want to discuss ebooks, e-books, ereaders, e-readers, epublshing or e-publishing.
Principally, I want to focus on e-fiction. Novels, short stories, flash fiction, poetry – anything we like to read which takes us away from our daily lives and on an adventure.
E-readers are wonderful things. We have the Sony, and it’s excellent. But we still have the stupid situation that we can buy a heavy, tree-based book in a supermarket for less than £5, but the publishers expect us to stump up £8 or more for the electronic version. When will these people learn? The lessons are there from music publishing. Early MP3s were so expensive that, naturally, people would share the MP3 files with their friends, and even with friends they didn’t know. Music publishers were late to the ball, and then fought an expensive rearguard action against file sharers. When all they needed to do was make the music priced competitively to start with. Now we can get tracks for considerably less than £1, a whole album for a few pounds. And that’s great. But ebooks, files from which the treebooks are printed, at £8 and upwards? No no no no no.
