Of paramount eImportance

Chap O'Keefe

"The fact that nothing ever needs to be out of print is, as far as I’m concerned, a big plus to digital publishing. It means that in theory everything ever written can be easily available. I also think that genres such as the western can reach a bigger audience as ebooks. I don’t really think there is a downside to ebooks themselves, since traditional books should be able to co-exist with this new technology. The ease of self-publishing means that at the moment there is a lot of swill about, and that could be seen as a downside, but quality will out and in time the bad writing will simply vanish. So long live the ebook." Jack Martin/Gary Dobbs


eBooks V traditional books - the debate has been raging for some time now, but why should the two mediums be in competition with each other? For many years we've had hardbacks,paperbacks, audio books and now eBooks are just another option for writers to reach an audience.

David Whitehead

"Ebooks are not demons, or replacements for books. They’re another outlet for creative writing. As before, the reader needs to be aware that not all books will live up to their promise in the blurb." Nik Morton


The latest Black Horse Extra eMagazine there's a great round table discussion, featuring three big names in western fiction today,  which really does look at both the pros and cons of eBooks and its relation to genre fiction. I urge anyone and everyone to read this interesting and illuminating article.

Nik Morton

"If we are to encourage this market to grow, and in the process see a resurgence of interest in the western and earn something extra from our labours, we must all always endeavour to make paramount the quality of our writing, and the presentation and affordability of our books." David Whitehead.

Direct link to ARTICLE
Link to entire MAGAZINE

FREE EBOOKS

This is a great site that hosts thousands of Ebooks that can all be downloaded for free in various formats, so your sure to find one compatible with your reader. Go HERE

BOOKS ARE COOL AGAIN

The digital onslaught continues - it has alreadyvirtually replaced your CD collection with MP3's, it's consigned your photo albums to the bottom drawer and taken over much of your viewing. Now it looks as if the digital revolution is very much set to replace those dusty tomes that line your bookshelf.

Sales of electronic books jumped 68.4 percent last year and skyrocketed 177 percent to $96.6 million for the year through August - Reports the Association of American Publishers and in the UK the situation is very much the same with several readers fighting for market dominance.

All told, about 1.2 million e-readers are expected to be sold in the last three months of the year -- roughly 40 percent of the entire year's stock. By the end of 2010, industry experts predict, 10 million people will be carrying e-readers. As for the number of e-books that people have read, they've lost track.

"To me, it's just inevitable when people told me they liked to touch and feel real books. I heard the same thing from LPs and CDs. The mass market, they want convenience and experience." Steve Haber, head of Sony's reading division.

But whatever happens with the digital book market and even if you're horrified at the prospect of regular books vanishing it must be admitted that Ereaders are encouraging people to read and that can only be a good thing. What remains to be seen is if the surge will continue after the novelty value goes away but from my own experience I now read far more on my ereader than regular books. Mind you that could be something to do with having gone through the entire Sherlock Holmes canon in recent months and I've got them all on my Elonex

STEPHEN KING E-BOOK NEWS

Stephen King's publisher is keeping the e-book edition of his novel "Under the Dome" under wraps until the day before Christmas, as tensions mount between book publishers and retailers over the crucial issue of pricing industry blockbusters.

Aiming to preserve the value of the hardcover edition, Scribner, an imprint of CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster publishing arm, is delaying the electronic-book publication of the King thriller until Dec. 24, or six weeks after the $35 hardcover hits the bookstores on Nov. 10.

King has stated that he is a huge fan of E-books but when asked if he owned a Kindle or Sony Reader he said he had both. When pushed he wouldn't say which system he preferred.

THE EBOOK REVOLUTION CONTINUES

The eBook reader space continues to get more crowded with Amazon’s Kindle 2, Sony and soon Barnes & Noble all jockeying for market share. Now LG, manufacturer of cell phones and LCD TVs is jumping into the eBook reader space with a solar powered device in 2012 that could eventually operate without ever charging from an electrical outlet.

That would go a long way in appealing to readers who still like the portability of paper-based books without the need to ever plug in for a charge. The new eBook reader would feature a 10 centimeter square solar cell, .7 millimeters thick and weighing 20 grams.

Right now the device would require exposure to sunlight for four to five hours to power day’s worth of reading. For an average reader that could work in for an extension once in a while but regularly remembering to leave the eBook reader in a sunny place every day could get overbearing.

LG is working on improving the power efficiency though, and solar cells continue to make gains in capturing solar power. Right now the device has an energy conversion efficiency of about 9.6%, and LG hopes to raise that to 14% prior to commercialization.

KIndle set back and those stats

The UK version of the Kindle which was expected to launch in October has now been put back until after Christmas due to the complexity of signing up the many partners needed for Europe wide WI-FI access.


“The Kindle is based on wireless technology. If you need agreement with carriers in the US, there is one carrier. In Europe it is a minefield as there are so many operators. If you buy a Kindle in the UK and want to read it on the beach on holiday in Spain, unless we have signed deals in Spain it is not going to work on that beach,” Brian Mcbride, UK Amazon managing director said.
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The Archive will be a little quiet today given the fact that I'll be on set all day filming for the third series of the BBC's Larkrise to Candleford. However we will be our usual industrious self again tomorrow. In the meantime here are the latest Stats.


Weekly Stats Report: 3 Aug - 9 Aug 2009
Project: THE TAINTED ARCHIVE
URL: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	183	192	319	211	241	296	217	1,659	237
Unique Visitors	149	128	191	138	177	197	144	1,124	161
First Time Visitors	117	106	151	105	144	157	118	898	128
Returning Visitors	32	22	40	33	33	40	26	226	32

ARCHIVE BOOK BIZ NEWS - UK Kindle on the way

A UK version of Amazon's Kindle is expected this autumn - publishers recently announced that they were expecting a October release for the gadget which has been a huge success in the US market. Last week Amazon announced that they had secured a UK manufacturing deal for the device. One of the biggest problems to the digital market is pricing of e-books which the current US system hardly being fair to the consumer. The average price for a new release in the US is about $9.99 which is not that much lower than a regular printed edition.

Random House digs in over e-book rights - the company have come under fire from agents for offering royalties on e-books at a far lower rate than other publishers. Random House had provoked anger of both writers and agents by offering royalties of 25% for major authors but much less for writers with small sales.

Two Ravens Press are going against the trend by offering e-books at half the price of the printed editions - the books will also be DRM free which seems the way to go as DRM places unfair restrictions on the end user. Two Ravens are also to be applauded for their fair pricing on e-books.

Harver Secker Publishing have bought Henning Mankell's first new Wallander novel in ten years. The Troubled Man will be released in hardback in Feb 2011.

DIGITAL READING - THE TAKEOVER CONTIUNUES

A very good mucker of mine, my American connection, Laurie Powers sent me the link to an interesting article from the New Yorker which looks at the Kindle and the future of electronic publishing.

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then GO HERE FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE

PUBLISHING - IS THE FUTURE DIGITAL?????

E-Books - is this the way forward for the humble old book?

Will digital downloads ever replace the good old book? Will bytes do away with paper? Will pixels replace ink?

Never - no way - emphatically no way. There's some magical link between author and reader when you hold a book, the smell of the thing, the feel of it in your hand. When you buy an E-Book you don't even get anything physical, anything real. No real paper books are here to stay!!!!

However look at it this way.

When the MP3 revolution started people scoffed that these digital downloads could ever threaten physically owing a CD and yet these day CD's are all but obsolete, or at least quickly becoming so. The charts are now compiled largely from downloads. I'm a huge music fan - I've thousands of CD's as well as a decent vinyl collection. And yet these days I've always got my 80G Ipod Classic with me - it stores a few thousand albums and when I link it up to the car stereo I have bags of choice, not to mention the podcasts it includes as well as video. I still have my CD's but I rarely play them now. MP3's when recorded at the highest rate sound just as good as discs and I've even bought a few albums off Itunes in MP3 format.


If MP3's can win me across then they can win anyone.



The younger generation have no problems with downloaded music - so maybe digital books are the way we've all been looking for to encourage the younger element to start reading again. I've seen the Borders own E-books reader in action and it's superb - weighs next to nothing and it looks so cool. It can also store a couple of hundred books in its memory. Sony also have a reader on the market (pictured) and Amazon are championing the Kindle.

The fact is that these E-book readers are not only limited to digital books but can deliver your daily newspaper, blogs and anything else you care to throw at it. They are, in fact, super cool gadgets and no doubt we are only around the corner from mobile phones (a favourite with kids) being used to read digital books. Imagine it - kids will be able to buy an entire package digitally - the movie, the tie-in novel and the computer game and use them all on the one gadget.

Yep, the writing's on the wall. As much as we book lovers are horrified with the thought of real books vanishing, it is inevitable that digital books will eventually rule the roost. Real books will be around for some time but take an imaginative leap forward say ten years. Will paper books be looked upon as a primitive, not to mention wasteful way to deliver information?

The advantages of digital books are that nothing ever needs to be out of print - course the pricing needs to drop somewhat before market dominance is achieved. And there's no reason for it not too - after all the production costs with digital books are minuscule in comparison to real books. Books will also be easier to sell in different countries, no shipping costs and waiting around for the thing to arrive. Just click "BUY" and in seconds the book is on your PC, reader or phone. There will be a new phenomenon in books then - that of piracy which is an issue affecting both the movie and music industry. But the answer to this is to price the product fairly because the book industry would be ill equipped to survive widespread piracy.

There are so many ramifications to consider but it's no use burying heads in sand - the day of the E-Book is coming. What that means to myself as a writer, I'm unsure but at the same time I'd rather look to the positives. Being able to get my books to readers all over the world at the click of a button sounds good but not having shelves full of books is not so.

Real books will be here for some time yet and digital will probably find a comfortable co-existence but, like it or not, the days of digital books being the main medium are not that far distant. We can either embrace the technology or get swept aside.