The ebook is changing how, what, and when people read.  The “how” is clear: many people are finding that carrying around and reading a book with an ereading device is better than lugging around a huge pbook.  Consider William Manchester Paul Reid’s The Last Lion, a biography about Winston Churchill.  (Yes, I read books like that too.)  This pbook (the version I’m reading isn’t even hardbound) weighs more than the bust of Beethoven sitting on my upright piano (I use fake books, the staple of piano bar musicians everywhere, to pretend I’m Schroeder)—in other words, the book could be used as a weapon in a murder mystery.  I received this book as a Christmas gift—people still like to give their reading friends and relatives’ pbooks because they’re a bit more tangible than ebooks, I suppose.  But avid readers like me are exploiting the ebook revolution to lessen the weight on our sagging bookshelves.  Instead of chaotic stacks of pbooks around the house, we fill our Kindles or other devices.  (Many devices are compatible with a free Kindle app downloadable from Amazon.)

There’s still a niche for pbooks.  Anything with a lot of graphics, especially color graphics—those famous coffee table books, for example—probably won’t work well in ebook format as long as paper-whites are still around (I prefer paper-white because they eliminate the glare).  My fake books are another example, although I’ve often wished I could change the “font size” of some that I find challenging my aging eyes (they started “aging” at twenty-one, so the downhill slide has been gradual).  Self-help pbooks are another example when they contain screen captures.  The latter don’t often help if you’re  using a paper-white device and the screen shots are in color; the font size is also a hindrance here too.  I tend to use my laptop, for example, if I’m trying to read an ebook written by some internet PR and marketing guru who uses screen captures.

The “what” is a bit more and less novel—more in the sense that it’s new, and less in the sense that the usual fiction novel is changing (geez, a reading pun this early in the year!).  Authors have begun to bundle entire novels together; in pbook form, they’d be weightier than the Churchill pbook (maybe not in content—Churchill’s life is stranger than fiction), but in ebook form, one just appends files (OK, maybe a new cover is also needed).  I’m thinking of bundling my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” for example.  That would be an enticing bargain for sci-fi readers and get me around the roadblock that the first ebook in that series, Survivors of the Chaos, published by Infinity, is no longer competitive in price (I’d rewrite and edit that novel completely to produce a second edition, like I did for Full Medical and Soldiers of God).  (POD firms like Infinity might become casualties of the ebook revolution too.)

Bundling goes in the opposite direction to the “soap opera” trend.  Even the Big Five publishers provide previews of novels by releasing ebooks that are only a few chapters of a novel, not satisfied (or not trusting?) Amazon’s peek-inside option on the book’s Amazon page (I’m guessing other online retailers have this feature too, but I rarely use it).  But now both indie and traditionally published authors are releasing novels by dribs and drabs, like an old-fashioned TV soap opera.  Readers shouldn’t ever get the idea that these dribs and drabs are complete novels, and they’re basically paying extra hard cash for something that’s free in the peek-inside features found at Amazon and other online retailers’ websites.

I can understand this mini-ebook phenomenon more in the context of short stories and novellas—two or three related short stories or a novella published as an inexpensive ebook.  Short story collections, for example, whether stories by the same author (Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java and Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, for example), or by different authors (like World Enough and Crime, containing many short stories, including another Chen and Castilblanco tale), don’t seem to do well in this new ebook universe.  Still, many writers are probably like me: I have a story idea and start writing, but I don’t know whether that idea will become a short story, novella, or novel.  Generally speaking, that’s a function of complexity.  I’d hate to see the short story form die out, though.  Let me suggest that we consider a short story collection to be something like a music album.  For the latter, individual tracks are sold now, as well as the entire album.  I have no problem with that, but I still want to be able to buy the entire album.  If you’re an author and want to go this route, keep me in mind.

This reminds me of an article in last Saturday’s ny times.  I find the newspaper a mixed bag now, but I tend to treat it like Fox News—both are biased, so you have to be an educated consumer by checking the veracity of a story and looking out for bias, especially with reporters like the Big Five’s Amazon attack dog Streitman, who’s as biased as they come, even though the times’ ombudsperson has come down on him.  The article has nothing to do with Amazon, although it indirectly lauds a Big Five publisher.  Edith Pearlman, a romance writer who focuses on short stories, just had her fifth story collection published, and Honedew Stories is her first anthology published by a “major house” (the latter is an euphemism for Little, Brown, owned by one of the Big Five).  Congrats to Edith.  That she needed five anthologies to be recognized is a damning indictment of NYC publishing, though.

I had a negative reaction when I checked out some of Ms. Pearlman’s previous anthologies—at $12.99, Little, Brown and Company are being greedy (and are doing this author no favors—I’d never buy an anthology at that price), compared to the $9.99 Lookout Books’ price (still too much for an anthology) for Binocular Vision, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award-Fiction (whatever that is).  Mind you, I’m discussing ebook versions of her anthologies.  (You can visit her Amazon author’s page for other versions.)  The ebook price of the new anthology is only four dollars less than the hardbound version.  That’s absurd, and another example of a Big Five publisher trying to support a failing yet traditional pbook business by gouging ebook buyers.

You might say, “Oh, you have an indie author’s agenda, Mr. Moore.”  Not at all.  I have an avid reader’s agenda!  Why should any reader pay almost as much for an ebook as for a hardbund when the ebook costs so much less to produce?  In fact, that’s another reason for the ebook’s popularity—it’s less expensive for the reader unless the publisher’s gouging the consumer.  Keep that in mind.  If you only read a few books per year, I guess it doesn’t matter so much.  But avid readers like me want quality at reasonable prices.  The Big Five can deliver that if they aren’t greedy.  I bought new Michael Connelly and Lee Child ebooks for less than $4—these are novels, not anthologies.  I won’t pay more than $5 for any ebook now!

I also had three knee-jerk but not necessarily negative reactions upon reading that ny times’ article: (1) Thank the Lord that someone is still writing short stories; (2) it’s amazing Neanderthal editors and their sycophant agents still think a short story collection will sell; and (3) Ms. Pearlman waited a long time for a major publisher to recognize her art—forty years, in fact.

The first knee-jerk reaction is simply praise for Ms. Pearlman—she has dedicated her life to the short story form, presumably because she feels she does it well and has something wonderful to tell in each story (I’ve never read anything by her, but I intend to if the prices come down—the only “literary fiction” I’ve read is by another Montclair, NJ author I met in a coffee house discussion).  If my suspicion is correct, it’s time to begin the dirge of bagpipes for the demise of the short story form—those dribs and drabs of novels will take its place because not enough short stories are written to make the music album analogy economically attractive for authors and publishers.

The third knee-jerk expresses my simple amazement at the author’s stamina.  It took me only a few years (and over 1000 rejections plus agents varying from incompetent to nasty and egotistical) to decide that traditional publishers and their flying circuses of sycophants were a waste of my time.  I suppose some of Ms. Pearlman’s patience can be explained by adherence to the short story medium—short stories have a natural, traditional niche in magazines (now ezines are taking over), especially the so-called “literary journals” dedicated to the “literary fiction” published by many university MFA departments (they have fewer readers every year, though, because the stories all too often are by academics writing for other academics).  To be fair, magazines cover all kinds of fiction writing, even genre fiction, and some of the more specialized genre rags even publish novellas.  A good short story is still worth your while if you can find it.

The second knee-jerk reaction simply reflects my opinion that anthologies don’t sell well anymore, whether traditionally or indie published.  Kudos to Little, Brown for publishing an anthology (see, I’ll say something positive about a Big Five publisher!).  Complete novels, on the other hand, don’t fit into the magazine mold too well, unless they’re serialized.  So, I guess we can take those “soap opera” ebooks as the new incarnation of a serialized novel, a medium that goes all the way back to Dickens and Rice Burroughs.  A website’s blog is a good place for serializations too.  I serialized my novel Evil Agenda.  An interesting experience and something like an expression of masochism—I view NaNoWriMo in the same way.  I still rewrote and re-edited Evil Agenda before turning it into an ebook.  I hope NaNoWriMo participants do the same because I doubt they have a polished work to release after only one month.

To finish up, let me discuss why ebooks change when people read.  We can find the hint of an answer in that Churchill volume again.  A reader isn’t likely to slip that pbook into his or her briefcase to read on the commuter train or during their lunch break at work.  People out for a caffeine fix at a coffee house aren’t likely to have that book in their purse (women) or man pouch (men) either.  It’s easy to do all that with an ebook.  Moreover, because you can read the same ebook on multiple devices, it’s something that you can do at a moment’s notice and making use of only snippets of time.

More libraries are climbing onto the ebook lending bandwagon too, and programs like Scribd, Oyster, and Amazon’s Prime are like lending libraries with enormous collections—you don’t have to buy ebooks anymore because you can borrow them.  (On Smashwords, I discount my ebooks for libraries—I wish Amazon allowed that.)  Finally, many books that were once out-of-print as pbooks have a second life as an ebook, so people addicted to “the classics” can have their fixes in a modern form.

Ebooks are computer files.  They’ll be eternal as long as the technology exists.  Producing them is cost-effective for publishers and authors alike; they would all be so for readers too if the former didn’t try to take advantage of huge margins.  Buying ebooks also means you aren’t contributing to the destruction of acres of forest either.  “The times are a-changin’,” Dylan said.  He needs another verse to that song, one praising the ebook revolution.  Anyone want to write it for him?

In elibris libertas…

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.