ebooks

I've been travelling in airports lately and have noticed more and more people toting around electronic book readers and it's common to overhear their owners sing the praises of their new devices to curious people inquiring about them. Anecdotely at least, it seems that these devices are starting to gain some traction with mainstream consumers.

What is interesting is how the devices are starting to change people's reading habits. This survey found that most people with ebook readers were reading the same amount as before, but a large percentage were reading more now that they had the gadgets in their pockets or purses.

That sounds like it would be good news for authors and publishers, but the spectre of book piracy looms. Some think that free copies of ebooks will be good for pushing physical books, but I'm not so sure. There was a time that video files were hard to pirate because internet connections were too slow and the file sizes were too big. Now it is easy to find and download movies and TV shows and e-book files are so laughably small that they could be sent by dial-up connections in no time at all.

In fact, it's not uncommon to see torrents of science fiction books that collect thousands of titles in one archive that could be downloaded with ease. How can book-sellers compete with that? The next few years are going to be interesting.

The news that Amazon is selling more electronic books for its Kindle than hardcover books is interesting. Does it signal some sort of tipping point that e-books have passed into the mainstream?

I've found myself reading e-books more and more and am perfectly comfortable with them, although they have their limitations, but I think that is mostly a problem when people try to adapt text from an existing printed form into an electronic one and the result is less than optimal.

The problem remains whether or not selling e-books, or e-any kind of media, is going to be sustainable in the long term. As this essay bluntly states, the internet is a copying machine and once copies are super-abundant, they become worthless. Will that happen to books and other media? People will pay for scarcity, but soon supply is going to outstrip demand.

The other thing I have found with electronic books is that they are even easier to amass than the physical ones which already strain my shelves to the point that they are becoming warped. When you can fit hundreds of electronic books in your pocket, you find that you want to read them all and end up skimming more than you would with "real" books.

Some think that we are becoming accustomed to skimming by reading on the internet. We're more interested in learning new facts than we are in actually absorbing those facts and taking the time to digest them. That has led some to propose a "slow reading" movement. I am all for it, but I wish I could read faster and with sufficient comprehension that I can actually plow through those books, physical and electronic, which are threating to bury me.

I am always intrigued by the way that authors are adapting to new publishing technologies.

One author who's been breaking all the rules is Robin Sloan. He's completely ignored the usual publishing gatekeepers and has come up with a variety of stunts that have him collecting decent money. I have no idea if his stories are worth reading as I am not at all familiar with his work, but I give him kudos for his inventiveness.

His most recent method to get his book written was to seek startup funding from donours and if he reached his target, he'd release the book for free. He made more money than most authors get for their first books.

A Canadian science fiction magazine called AE tried a similar approach and appeared to reach their funding goal, but one of their backers didn't actually have money to invest with them.

One publisher doesn't like the direction that things are going and is stepping back to make something old new again. They are publishing stories on vinyl records in an effort to get us to slow down a bit. I assume they are starving artists and don't actually want to make any money or it's a clever ruse to get people to pay attention to their company.

The downside of this migration to electronic platforms is that it will erode the future of "bookshelf porn," those delicious photos of other people's book collections that re-assure all of us bibliophiles that we are not the only ones afflicted.

For electronic books and electronic readers, we are living in the equivalent of the pre-Cambrian period of evolution on this planet. There was an explosion of varied life-forms, most of which eventually died off to be replaced by evolutionary successful species.

We're seeing a similar outburst of electronic reading devices with a dizzying array of formats and attempts to restyle books for the new medium.

An interesting experiment recently launched which involves Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and a host of other writers. The "book" will be released over the course of about a year and be available in a variety of formats. It is called The Mongoliad. Its Facebook page describes it as "the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity." It sounds like something worth investigating.

Another interesting experiment in electronic publishing that caught my eye was one Canadian science fiction author's attempt to get you to read his book that involves paying you, the reader. No, he doesn't give every reader money directly, but instead is offering a contest with cash prizes to people who have read his new novel.

To encourage more people to publish their own works directly, Barnes & Noble has jumped on the e-self-publishing bandwagon with their new service, PubIt.

So what will be the tipping point that gets most of us reading our books on electronic readers? It appears to be price. When the price on those gizmos comes down, we'll be rushing out to buy them. The tree will be happy to see that day.

One drawback of all these screens, though, is a recent study that explains how their light fools our bodies into thinking it's still daytime which is playing havoc with our sleep cycles.

During the heyday of pulp magazines, authors churned out stories as quickly as they could for eager audiences. IO9 wonders if pulp sci-fi could be updated for modern audiences by removing some of the racist and outdated notions that plagued those early stories.

Of course it can. The question to ask is if there is a modern audience for those kind of stories that were long on adventure and short on plausibility. I'd say yes and I think the rise of the ebook reader could be the sort of thing that might spur people to create more stories like that.

Portable devices are the perfect medium for short hits of escapist fiction that could be consumed by commuters or people stuck somewhere looking for a diversion to kill time.

Apple's iPad is the latest portable device that is perfect for book reading, although it is perhaps a bit too unwieldy to use beyond the home. Some publishers are hoping that it will be the salvation of the book-publishing industry.

Back to the idea of pulp fiction for a moment. The man who helped popularize the form for science fiction fans was none other than Hugo Gernsback. I wonder if we'll look back at this time and be able to single out an individual who will this century's equivalent figure in the history of the genre.

Don't count science fiction author Cory Doctorow among fans of Apple's new iPad. He's posted a polemic on Boing Boing about why he won't buy one and the reasons why you should follow his lead.

It doesn't look like many are listening to his arguments because it looks like they're selling decent numbers of them, although depending on who you listen to they are not selling as well as anticipated or are beating all expectations. I think it depends on what side of the reality distortion field you are sitting on.

Doctorow's not the only naysayer when it comes to the iPad. Sure, there are lots of upbeat reviews and it will doubtless appeal to a wide number of people, but there are some that aren't so sure.

I'm not about to buy an iPad any time soon, but I do appreciate that Apple's innovations will lead to competitors coming out with cheaper, and possibly better, tablets in the near future and that means more choice for everyone. It may also usher in a new era of electronic books.

Electronic books have been around for a while and have not been much of a success, but that could change if electronic readers become ubiquitous.

Another dedicated book reader which has not received the same amount of attention as the iPad or the Kindle is Barnes and Nobles Nook. Canadian science fiction author Robert Sawyer got his hands on one and wrote up a favourable review of it.

Here in Canada, we can't buy Nooks, only recent got access to the Kindle and won't get the iPad until the end of April. Canadian book retailer Indigo/Chapters is looking at launching its own dedicated electronic reader by year's end. I suspect it might be too little too late, but it's always good to have more competition.

The worst thing about electronic books, though, is the eventual demise of book cover art.

Authors who support giving away free, electronic copies of their books have said that it helps generate sales of physical copies of their books and now there's a study that supports that view, although it's interesting to note that the study found that when science-fiction publisher Tor gave away books, it actually hurt sales.

I've always said that once electronic book readers become more popular and easier to use, that giveaway model is going to collapse. I suspect those science-fiction readers are early adopters of book-reading devices and are more than content to have electronic versions of books over physical copies. The aforementioned article theorized that the Tor giveaways were not successful because the electronic books were only given away for a short period of time and it wasn't long enough to have an effect on book sales.

Science fiction author Ben Bova once wrote a novel predicting the electronic book market. He points out that it was meant to be a satire of the publishing industry at the time he wrote it, but is amazed at how prophetic he was.

Just to give you an idea of how electronic books are hitting a tipping point, there are now more e-book apps for the Apple iPhone than there are games.

Meanwhile, Samsung has entered the e-book reader fray with its own device and it has partnered with Barnes & Noble in the U.S. in an effort to help sell it.

There's no word if it will be available here in Canada, but if the government ever lifted its draconian Canadian ownership rules for bookstores, we might have B&N stores here and some actual competition.

With the announcement last week of Apple's new iPad, it looks like Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle, will have some serious competition. While the iPad isn't more of a multi-purpose device than the Kindle, many readers are intrigued by the possibilities of the new Apple tablet, especially comic book fans.

If that wasn't enough bad news, Amazon got into a public fight with the book publisher Macmillan over setting the price of electronic books. Macmillan, which operates the science fiction imprint Tor, wants to control pricing, but Amazon wouldn't let them, so they delisted all of their books from their site over the weekend.

It wasn't long before Amazon caved in and agreed to let the publisher sell the books at prices higher than the $9.99 set by the online retailer. SF author John Scalzi thinks the move has tarnished the company's reputation with its users as well as authors.

Amazon has been working hard to get people to buy their electronic books and one strategy they have is to give away free books for people to download to their Kindles although they are primarily public domain classics.

Meanwhile, the company which is most likely to prevail in all of these electronic book skirmishes is Google. They have been quielty digitizing books for years and are slowly building a massive online library of electronic titles and are poised to begin selling them. One author who is pissed off at Google's strategy is Ursula LeGuin. She's been mobilizing other authors against the agreement to let Google sell their books because she sees it as surrendering of copyright to a huge corporation.

In other electronic book developments, futurist Ray Kurzweil is entering into the fray with a new reader platform called Blio. It's not a device, but is software that will run on computers and mobile devices.

While all of this posturing for market share continues, the Chinese are working on their electronic book readers that will ultimately force reader prices downwards and probably outsell all of their American competitors by a wide margin.

Lots of attention is paid to Amazon's Kindle, but it's hardly the only ebook reader in town, Barnes and Noble recently came out with their own device called the Nook. What's interesting about that device is that hackers have already managed to crack the machine which means that it may actually become a more popular device because it can bypass unpopular digital rights managements schemes that publishers seem intent on foisting upon their customers.

In addition to Barnes and Noble, at least 5 major publishers are banding together to compete with Amazon's Kindle. Some are predicting that Adobe will be the eventual winner of the ebooks sweepstakes since more than 100 publishers have signed up with them to distribute encrypted PDF versions of their books. Perhaps the publishers are lining up, but will readers?

Let's be honest. No one really knows where electronic publishing is going, but people are still making bold predictions about the year ahead.

Even though I keep buying physical books, I've found myself more and more looking for electronic versions of certain titles that are on my to-read list. Since I'm not likely to read all of the books on my bookshelves, I figure that at the very least the electronic ones won't take up any more room.

I don't have any statistics to back me up, but I have a feeling that comic book companies make a lot more money licensing their characters for movies than they do with comic books. That doesn't mean that comic books are dead, but they are certainly a niche medium, at least in North America.

That might change with the advent of the e-book. While comic books might not look so great on a mobile phone, some are betting that the mythical Apple tablet would revive comic books to their former glory thanks to the larger screen that this imagined device would have.

E-books certainly have the power to disrupt the publishing business as we know it. Margins are thin enough that even a small erosion of sales caused by the early adoption of electronic book readers that the disruption could come sooner rather than later.

One company which is working toward the new digital future is Harlequin. I've written earlier about their plans to create an electronic-only imprint that would publish across many genres, but the SFWA has oposed the move, saying that it is nothing more than a vanity press.

While you're waiting for the Apple Tablet's arrival on which to read your favourite science fiction comic books, study this list of the top 10 science fiction graphic novels that you'll want to load up on yours after you buy one. If you want something even older, consider the Science Fiction Classics comic book anthologies.

When you are reading everything electronically, you can get rid of your old comic books by turning them into nifty wallets like this one.