Will E-Books Lead to Longer Novels?

It will depend on individual reading habits. Right now, short stories and novella's are hot sellers along with the typical length genre fiction.

Personally, I am not sure I could read longer stories on a screen. I work all day on screens and when I relax, the last thing I want to do is look at another screen. But, that too may change over time and it will always depend on the writing and the story.

I know that recently I finished a huge, long book that I wouldn't have been able to hold up in my fat little fingers and was much easier to read off my Nook.

For me it's a case of ease. Some paperbacks are just too bulky to hold comfortably for me and the ebook is so much easier.

I would agree with Thothgaurd51, novellas are definitely a hot item in e-books.

I don't own one myself, but it's nice for those who write shorter works (like me) otherwise I would never get published. Not many traditional pubs want to publish really short works, so it works in the favor on those writers, which is a good thing, cause I can never seem to write anything longer than 40K.

I think the e-reader is a boon both for the novella and the huge wordcount novels, since it was the print publishers who eventually curbed the word count of novels due to their cost - both extremely thin books and extremely fat books are exponentially more expensive for a print publisher.

Thothguard's argument doesn't make sense to me - an e-reader like Kindle uses another screen than a computer [e-Ink], so the eye fatigue is less and the experience is akin to reading a printed page. And nobody asks a reader to read the book in one sitting.

I think the pricing of e-books allows authors to match the pricing to the word count: 99 cents for short stories/novellas, 3.99 for a novel or short story collection, and 6.99 for a novel collection or epic novel. Which, in the end, would serve both creator and customer with providing realistic prices.

However, most books can stand to lose 20-30% of their volume. Not just to slim them down, but also to tighten the novel - verbosity is a malady that affects many writers and if writers don't force themselves to slim down their epic tomes, there is a big chance that bloated self-published books become the norm...

I'd say shorter books sell well in e-format.

Reason? Some people don't have a dedicated ereader and read on their computer screen. Longer books can lead to eyestrain.

Also in my case, certainly, longer books sometimes necessitate backflipping to check details, and with an ereader, yes, there's a search function, but you can only look at one page at a time. With print books you can flip back, put a market in that page, keep your finger in another, leave your bookmark further on...

scarletpeaches said:

Also in my case, certainly, longer books sometimes necessitate backflipping to check details, and with an ereader, yes, there's a search function, but you can only look at one page at a time. With print books you can flip back, put a market in that page, keep your finger in another, leave your bookmark further on...

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My Kindle allows for as many bookmarks, highlights and notations I want - I guess because you read on a computer that you don't have this feature, although I'm pretty sure that Kindle for PC has these possibilities also.

I agree however that e-readers are especially welcome to short story and novella writers, because most print publishers shy away, even if they're collected. Unless you're Stephen King, of course.

There are some hardware and software limits wrt to size with ebooks; these limits, and their nature, vary on different devices/apps.

The indexing is already a problem with some large illustrated textbooks, for instance; the size of the index makes searching prohibitively slow. Norton has put off releasing their Giant Literature Anthologies as ebooks for a bit while the technology catches up.

I think this is temporary, and will change. I also note that it's not as if books like Richardson's Clarissa, or the Harry Potter tomes, or Edward Rutherford's aren't working . . . and I doubt most novels would exceed those by much, if any. The single volume editions of LOTR are only marginally slower than, say, any of the single volumes on Kindle and iPad; haven't tried them on other ereaders.

AmsterdamAssassin said:

My Kindle allows for as many bookmarks, highlights and notations I want - I guess because you read on a computer that you don't have this feature, although I'm pretty sure that Kindle for PC has these possibilities also.

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I don't.

While ebooks allow a wider range of lengths, the price points still mean that with longer works the author is getting paid less per word. Right now the sweet spot for the author is actually shorter than conventional novel lengths, more in the novella range.

scarletpeaches said:

I don't.

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Sorry, I misread your post.

My point being, you can't flip back and forth between pages in an instant.

And, as veinglory has already pointed out, teh munniez is moar betterer for the authors of ebooks with novellas. Or more cost-effective, put it that way.

Says me, who's never sold anything of less than 62k words.

scarletpeaches said:

My point being, you can't flip back and forth between pages in an instant.

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A few pages back and forth go easily. Searching a book for a certain passage or last instant of a character can be easier in a print book, but it can also be easier on an e-reader, depending on the size of the book/file and the search function. I've had stuff happening in, for instance, Jeffrey Deaver books where I wanted to search back, but scanning the pages for the passage I was looking for was frustrating and would've been easier with a search function. But just going back two pages for a passage, that's easier in a print book.

I still like both e-book and print book, so I'm not arguing which one is 'best', but I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised about my Kindle, especially for editing my own work.

scarletpeaches said:

With print books you can flip back, put a market in that page, keep your finger in another, leave your bookmark further on...

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Actually I find Stanza on the iPhone does this well - you can set bookmarks and there's a very fast full text search.

The Nook has a search function. I use it quite a bit and it works pretty well.

Yes, yes, just about every ereader has a search function but it's still not as rapid as a print book for flipping from page to page.

When it comes to longer books I much prefer print. I've read maybe two 100k+ novels on my ereader since I got it. One by a fellow AWer, the other isn't published yet (connections? I haz dem. Nyar!).

The vast majority of ebooks I've read have been in the novella/short novel range.

I've seen a huge rise in novellas and short story collections as well. It doesn't seem worth it to write a very long novel and charge $2.99 or $3.99 for it (although I've seen someone have success charging 4.95 or so for longer novels, but most readers seem to flock to lower price points).

However, I would LOVE to read school textbooks on an ereader. One of mine is nearly 2,000 pages, and it's difficult to lug around.

Textbooks for ereaders are becoming more and more popular. There are already many college textbooks available for ereaders (although, so far as I can tell they appear to mostly be sold as attachments to the textbooks themselves).

I'd love to lay my hands on a copy of Cellular Biology, Molecular Biology, and The Natural History And Biodiversity Of Insects (a mammoth tome but filled with beautiful photographs).

Especially with content that has to be updated regularly, such as school/study texts, I think the e-reader will break new ground quite soon. You buy a textbook once and you can download the free upgrades, that kind of thing.
And it won't be long now before children will take an iPad to school and make their tests on encrypted school computers with digital IDs to make fraud difficult.

The licensing problems with heavily illustrated-by-photographs textbooks are currently nightmarish.

Right now, publishers are only looking at Adobe technologies for color photographs--in part because, well, you want it to look good, but also the usual issues of piracy etc.

Also, from the production pov of those making ebooks, we're interested in doing more than we can with a codex book. But that means higher costs as well.

I'm impatient--we did things in the 1990s that we can't do currently on the platforms we have available. And that's frustrating.

AmsterdamAssassin said:

Especially with content that has to be updated regularly, such as school/study texts, I think the e-reader will break new ground quite soon. You buy a textbook once and you can download the free upgrades, that kind of thing.

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That's the nightmare that textbook publishers are sweating over; the don't want that, at all.

In fact, they're keenly interested, especially in the sciences, in time-based DRM.

Medievalist said:

That's the nightmare that textbook publishers are sweating over; the don't want that, at all.

In fact, they're keenly interested, especially in the sciences, in time-based DRM.

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I'm sure you're right about this. I graduated from nursing school a couple of years ago and have less-than-fond memories of spending $170 on a 1400-page anatomy textbook (for example).

From what I understand, textbooks are a major moneymaker for (at least some) publishers. Students have to have them and so publishers can charge whatever they want.

But getting back to the original subject...

I don't think ebooks will necessarily lead to longer books but it will make longer books possible. But not immediately.

Why not immediately? Because they haven't been written yet.

As an example, the novel I'm working on should be one of those 300,000 word epics. But it was repeatedly emphasized that something that size would be unpublishable so I divided it into three books. I'm not particularly happy with where the first book ends but it was the only possible spot. As it was, I had to spend lots of time moving stuff around to make it a (more-or-less) stand-alone novel.

But word count is not an issue in epublishing. So I'm seriously considering going back to my original plan - one big book. But obviously it hasn't been written yet. That's why I think it will take time for much longer books to appear. But now it's possible.

SJp said:

Forgive me if this has been asked before. I didn't see this question posed anywhere. With e-readers continuing to rise, do you believe we will see growing number of lengthier fiction be considered and published?

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I expect to see more novels of many lengths. Writers can now publish anything they want with ebooks--400,000 word virtual doorstops, 50,000 word serial novels, everything in between and beyond. Stuff that a legacy publisher would probably not touch is possible with ebooks.