The first article in this series of musings, In the Era of eBooks, What Is a Book Worth? (I), brought a lot of comment, particularly on blogs that reprinted it. Most commenters disagreed with me, and several of the commenters compared an author’s uniqueness and a book’s worth to a painting.
Entries Tagged as 'ebooks'
In the Era of eBooks, What Is a Book Worth? (I)
April 25th, 2011 · 8 Comments · opinion
Some questions have no answer, or at least not a universal answer. This is true of this question: In the era of ebooks, what is a book worth? Yet, every day, ebookers are making that value judgement, including in their calculation of whether or not to buy an ebook what they believe is the worth of a [...]
Ads in eBooks Are a Good Thing. Deal with It.
April 20th, 2011 · 11 Comments · opinion
Amazon is introducing an advertising component to the Kindle platform. I love it. Kudos to Jeff Bezos & Co. for their forward thinking on this initiative. I’m talking about the less expensive ($114) device currently known as “Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers.” (It’s not the sexiest name but it certainly describes the product! [...]
On Words & eBooks: What Does It Take?
April 11th, 2011 · 11 Comments · opinion
In past articles, I have spoken of the need for indie authors to use professional editors (see, e.g., On Words: Is the Correct Word Important?, Professional Editors: Publishers and Authors Need Them (Part 1), and Professional Editors: Publishers and Authors Need Them (Part 2)). Alas, there is always an excuse for not using them. A little more than [...]
Enhanced ebooks are dead – Evan Schnittman was mostly right
April 10th, 2011 · 7 Comments · opinion
The London Book Fair is going to begin tomorrow, and today there was a digital conference. One of the key topics at was enhanced ebooks. Specifically, Evan Schnittman, the managing director of Bloomsbury, is reported to have argued in his keynote that enhanced ebooks are dead. I’m waiting to hear back from him, and all [...]
Ebooks will bring chaos, panic, and disorder
April 2nd, 2011 · 11 Comments · opinion
I’ve had an epiphany this past week, and it finally put the scale of the ebook revolution into focus. Some publishers are panicked because they think everything is about to change. They see ebooks as a coming tsunami that could wipe away their existing business model. They should be afraid; vast chunks of the existing [...]
The Missing Ingredient: Quality Control in Indie eBooks
March 16th, 2011 · 9 Comments · opinion
To me, the lack of quality control is a big deterrent to paying more than a dollar or two for an indie ebook from an author whose books I have not previously read. In the beginning, Smashwords was a great place to find indie books and give them a try, but that is rapidly changing as the number [...]
Taoyuan International Airport now has a digital library
March 12th, 2011 · 1 Comment · hardware news, opinion
But you can’t check out ebooks, dammit. Taiwan’s main airport has just launched a reading lounge. These lounges are stocked with around 2k paper books and about 30 gadgets you can read on, a mix of iPads and dedicated e-readers.In terms of formats, they had the good sense to limit themselves to only Epub and [...]
Andy Rooney hates ebooks – including his (video)
March 6th, 2011 · 9 Comments · video
Just a few minutes ago the show 60 minutes wrapped up their broadcast with Andy Rooney’s weekly essay. This week his topic was e-readers. I found the clip on the CBS website and it’s embedded at the end of the post. As you might expect, he hates ebooks and e-readers. He doesn’t really add anything [...]
18% of the UK read ebooks
March 3rd, 2011 · 1 Comment · surveys & polls
Over in the UK and Ireland it’s World Book Day today, and several survey companies have released recent polling dat about how people read. Mintel released a report today that showed even though 18% read ebooks, nearly half of the UK (49%) still prefers paper books over digital. The problem with that number, though, is [...]
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