Tech Blog

[#1]

Last week Nicholas Negroponte was quoted as saying that the physical book would be dead in 5 years— Nicholas Negroponte: The Physical Book Is Dead In 5 Years —which I thought is pushing it a little. Sure I love ebooks, and would rather have an ebook version over a paper version now, but gone in 5 years? Now I don't know if it was just kismet of timing, around the same time, Kobo announced that it was dropping the price of its eReader device from $150 to $128 dollars. Hmm, okay, that's just competition with other eReader devices. Well today I read on Ars Technica something that to me finally tips the scale to the full-on decline of paper— Mass romance novel publisher going all in on e-books .

Yeah, fine, laugh. Do you know that one of the largest publishers in the world is Harlequin? Yeah, bodice rippers. Based in Toronto, btw. So maybe I haven't heard of Dorchester before, but I do know that Harlequin was already putting a ton of effort into ebooks last year . These are huge, just huge, influencers on the publishing industry. Millions of books, earning billions of dollars and if a publisher thinks that their market is ready for ebooks, you can bet that they are betting on solid financials. From a consumer's standpoint, I can see the appeal of an ebook version of bodice rippers (aka "pink books"). If the occasional romance novel is your guilty pleasure, you can read on your Kindle, Kobo, Nook, or iPad to your heart's content and no one can see the cover.

I'm just putting the dots together here. Paper books cost a lot more generate than ebooks do. No printing presses, no paper, no ink, no shipping required, no trucks…create once and little incremental cost. The economics make sense to me. The economics are, in fact, something that makes me pretty darn happy about becoming (for all intents and purposes) a full-time author and writer. The financial risk of publishing a book is reduced significantly. Less risk, then it's a lot easier to take a chance on new authors or a topic that might seem to have a limited audience. Yes, I will miss some paper books, and I hope that the five year demise is an exaggeration, but I'm not going to worry about that now.

I have books to write!