wmenorr67: I'm fiddle farting around on Speicher waiting to see whether the Iraqis will ask us to stay or not.
MrsSmith: I too am a huge fan of paperbacks but Avenger29 nailed it when he said that capacity, portability, a capabilities of an e-reader make it a useful tool. Like I said earlier, they are great for traveling. Now if only they'd cut the price of e-books instead of charging the same price as regular books.
I can see that being a benefit (great for traveling). I guess I just get stuck in my ways. Took me several years to give up my film cameras and switch to digital, now I can't imagine going back to film. Well, not entirely true, I'd still love to set up a darkroom and do my own b/w stuff, but strictly for art. Anyway, I'm sure I'll make the leap to an e-reader at some point. But would it not make more sense in my situation to go the full step to an iPad or some equivalent? It seems like it would be a lot easier when I have to travel than lugging my laptop to work from. And can't it do pretty much everything? Books, music, email, browsing. Can they view pdf files? Create documents? Do I really need a smart phone, an e-reader, an iPod, and an iPad? The work I need to do would be miserably difficult on my
smart stupid phone and sparks my temper as much as idiots on the road in front of me in traffic.
Solution?
As to the cost of e-books. As a writer, this is kind of a sore subject. Going the traditional route of printing with a publisher, the writer really only makes a very small percentage of the cover price of a book. And out of that comes the agent’s percentage. But without an agent it’s difficult to get into the bigger publishing houses where you have a slightly better shot of getting your book noticed. Or at least the prestige of saying, “Bantam picked me up!” Whatever. That isn't why most of us write.
The whole e-book thing has leveled the playing field a little bit for new authors, but it still isn’t an easy way to earn a living. You spend months working on a manuscript, then hire an editor to find everything that’s wrong with it, then spend more time fixing those issues. You have to promote yourself through social networking, blog, website, all of which is time consuming. You have to do the homework to get your e-book listed on Amazon and whatever other sites are out there, and give up a cut to them for selling it. For all of that, I hardly think anywhere in the $2.99 to $9.99 range for a new release is too much to ask. While there is no overhead with regard to paper or printing, there is still overhead and while there are some who may not agree, my time and my creativity are worth something. If you personally aren’t willing to pay me $9.99 to read something I have put my heart and soul and energy into for months on end, then I might as well just take a sledgehammer to my laptop and go tend bar in a little tiki-hut in some far-flung island.
IMHO.
