E-Books/Do People Read Them?

e-books do people read them?

AE, Yes there is a market for e-books. Both of my novels Bought And Paid For and Scimitar are available as e-books. BAPF can be bought from all online catalogues. anyone seeking Scimitar can get it as an e-bookthrough Author House.

As you may know there are some outfits that produce only e-books. Frankly I'm not sure why anyone would want to pay for that service when one can easily format a book and put it into Adobe PDF and sell it on a personal website or through an online catalogue. But I digress.

The market for e-books, for my books at least, are mainly in Asia and some parts of Europe where readers must wait weeks and weeks to get a book (customs you know). The cost too is a big factor since shipping costs are very high. E-books offers an inexpensive means of purchace as well as a speedy delivery. About 1/3rd of my books are e-book purchases.
Michael

citymouse said:

As you may know there are some outfits that produce only e-books. Frankly I'm not sure why anyone would want to pay for that service when one can easily format a book and put it into Adobe PDF and sell it on a personal website or through an online catalogue. But I digress.

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Because a good epublisher will sell 1000 copies or so of a title in a year and my home-page would be doing very, very well to sell 100.

There is an ebook market but it is much smaller than the market for paper-books. It only reaches a significant size in certain markets such as certain non-fiction, romance and erotica.

It is important to choose a publisher with an established readership and reputation for only releasing quality work.

There are e-versions of print books available for download to pocket readers or a computer. I've nothing to say one way or another on those. For the rest:

No one said it better for me than SFWA:

http://www.sfwa.org/beware/epublishers.html

Stephen King's Riding the Bullet came out as an e-book.

It tanked. Big time. They later brought it out as a print book so they could make some money on it.

If a mega-seller like King can't make squat in e-publishing, what chance do the rest of us have?

Since they started offering them I would dip in and check out the sample reads of various e-books.

Unless it had been previously published as a print book or had been written by an experienced print published writer, I was consistantly disappointed by the quality of writing and editing. I've been told there are lilies growing in the e-swamp, but have yet to find one.

I have bought exactly ONE e-book, ever, and then it was only to research the publisher. That house is a cut above the rest, but their quality still varies from almost decent to bloody dreadful. The book--which was the best I could find in its genre--was mediocre and could have used an edit.

With one e-publisher I offered my resume as an editor because it was quite clear they were wholly clueless about the basics of editing. (It was not PA.) I never heard back from them.

E-publishing is here to stay, and perhaps the quality of product will improve, but as an industry it's been dragging its feet on that point. Since they don't pay an advance, they have no vested interest in putting out a good product to make back their investment. Too many of them state that they will "respect the writer's work."

Soon as I see that phrase or a variation on an e-book site I leave without buying.

The e-book industry has its place, has its readers and supporters, but for a writer wanting professional credit and recognition, wanting to get paid for her work and maybe get a little respect from other writers, it is not the way to go.

I have many ebooks, but they're all nonfiction. I can see them as a resource, but I don't have any interest in them for entertainment. I like being able to go to specific sections and print out what I need, if necessary. I don't like the idea of sitting down to read fiction at the computer . . . I save the kind of reading for in a more comfortable place. I guess I could print it out, but I think that's best saved for publishers.

In my genre there are 3 -4 epublishers that I can buy from knowing the book with be decent quality--equivalent to what is in print. As epublishers are much easier and cheaper to start than paper-publishers there is more need for caveat emptor.

However there *are* people making a living from e-books. They write in genres that sell pretty well online and publisher with the top few epublishers. There are also writers who publish in print and e-form, and by that I mean they have books with major NY publsihers but still also write e-books.

They are in the minority, there is a lot of jumping on bandwagons occuring right now and epublishing should only be done after a hefty amount fo research.

Another thing to consider with e-books is that a lot of people have trouble reading at a computer for an extended period of time. That goes double if your target audience is 40+. As an optician, I hear it all the time - not about ebooks specifically - but about how people in glasses (and that's most people 40+) cannot read well at a computer. That's the #1 complaint in an optical shop.

Piers Anthony put together a list of small electronic publishers and has little writeups on each. http://www.hipiers.com/publishing.html#E1 There are plenty who are legitimate and don't ask you to pay.

Legitimate publishers pay the author, not the other way around. That should hold true for e-book publishers as well as print.

And wow -- the writeup Piers Anthony did is impressively thorough.

Alien Enigma said:

Thank you all for your answers. I have another question. I checked out some epublishers in the past, and they seemed to all want the author to pay. Is that the custom?

I've also been informed that a publisher might create an e-book when a physical book is released. For an unpreviously published title would an author have to pay, or do only the companies that are not up to par ask for that?


Jeff

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Unless *you* are self publishing--never pay. Never. The publisher pays you.

my book is being released from Mundania Press in both trade and e-book format. Not getting a penny from me.



they also publish Piers Anthony's work as well.

I'm trying e-pub for my first two books mostly because I've met e-pub authors and they have fanbases, even people asking for autographs! The big sellers on e-pubs (and these aren't pay-for houses) are erotica, romance of all types, and sci fi. I've gone to author's signings with my friends and seen people come in and purchase a lot of books! If you want to quit your day job, then try to publish the traditional way and pray for a bestseller. Most authors aren't rich; they just want readers. My friend has a Yahoo site and over fifty members who chat about her books. It's awesome!

psm0904 said:

I'm trying e-pub for my first two books mostly because I've met e-pub authors and they have fanbases, even people asking for autographs! The big sellers on e-pubs (and these aren't pay-for houses) are erotica, romance of all types, and sci fi. I've gone to author's signings with my friends and seen people come in and purchase a lot of books! If you want to quit your day job, then try to publish the traditional way and pray for a bestseller. Most authors aren't rich; they just want readers. My friend has a Yahoo site and over fifty members who chat about her books. It's awesome!

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I just got notice that Harper Collins is putting out an e-version of my book, originally published in softcover in 2002. I'm wondering how to find out how it's doing. Is there a central site for ebook downloads or what?

Sort of. Fictionwise is a big one.

HarperCollins tends to use www.ereader.com, for the Palm, and to do Adobe Acrobat versions, sold through Fictionwise and Amazon, among other retailers.

Check your contract to make sure you get royalties on e-books; some publishers are very very tricky.

My first Star Trek story was an e-book (Starfleet Corps of Engineers). It's doing quite well from what I've heard.

There is a cadre of Star Trek fans who wait for the various e-stories to be bundled together and sold as dead-tree books, but others who enjoy picking up the e-books. Some of the Star Trek fans ONLY read e-books when they're available, preferring to read on their PDAs rather than hauling a number of books with them on their trips/commutes/etc.

Then again, SF fans do tend to be early adopters.

As Marco Palmieri (the Editor-in-Chief for the Star Trek line) pointed out, the e-books allow them to experiment with ideas and stories they might not take a chance on in print. Some of their best selling new authors have come up through the Pocket e-book line and then gone on to the standard MMPB novels.

I don't think e-books are going to replace Pocket's HB/TPB/MMPB line anytime soon, but it's a nice source of income for them and it allows them to "audition" new writers. It's a win/win for them.

I "checked out" my first ebook from the library yesterday. While I can't imagine ebooks ever supplanting print, I can see real advantages to them under certain circumstances. Great for traveling, you can check them out on line and don't have to physically take them back. The big problem I see is the reading hardware. I tried using my Palm handheld. No way! And I spend enough time in front of a computer as is, I'm d&mn sure not going to sit there and read for enjoyment. Until a decent reader is available that can read pdf and other formats, ebooks are going to exist on the fringes. That's a real shame. I understand Sony is about to come up with a new one, but the tech-heads seem to think they will screw it up. Some company is going to come up with the right product and ebooks will take off.

FWIW, I'm hooked on listening to audiobooks on my Zen portable media player. It's great. No cassettes to malfunction and I check them out online. I think ebooks are just waiting for the right technology.

check out the elora's cave site and cerridwen press site... both are doing well with e-publishing.

the1dsquared said:

I understand Sony is about to come up with a new one, but the tech-heads seem to think they will screw it up. Some company is going to come up with the right product and ebooks will take off.

FWIW, I'm hooked on listening to audiobooks on my Zen portable media player. It's great. No cassettes to malfunction and I check them out online. I think ebooks are just waiting for the right technology.

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I don't get why everyone is waiting for some new technology, when what everyone's been waiting for is already on the market. The Sony reader is out now, as well as the superior iRex Iliad. They're expensive, but it's no harder on the eyes than regular paper. The only bad thing about them is the price, but that will come down eventually.

I'll never understand this group of nay-sayers who persist in giving nebulous predictions like "it'll screw up" when we have the technology already, and it works. I think now it's more of a marketing problem than a technical one.

I disagree. I find them very hard on my eyes--especially as it is hard to resize the font and when you do the small screen size makes sentences hard to scan. Consider that not everyone has perfect vision--in these modern times some degree of deficit is the norm.

RG, it's good to hear that products are out there. But the lack of decent marketing means that they might as well NOT have been developed. Google ebook reader or ebook hardware. I got a bunch of oldish stuff that didn't sell me on any of them. I'm going to check out the products you mentioned, but price does matter.

I really have a hard problem understanding how in this case, technology hasn't filled this need (for whatever reason). Emily, have you tried the readers that RG mentioned? Do you have any recommendations?

Yeah, backlit LCD screens are a pain. But surely you can't be talking about the new units I mentioned, because they have large, A5 sized screens. And the human eye can't tell the difference between this electronic ink and regular printed paper. These are nothing like palm pilots or the cybook.