Ebook Revolution

Baby with IPAD

I just came back from a writers' conference, and it blew my mind.  The whole industry change! 

We've all seen how some of the big box book stores with coffee bars and cozy places to cuddle up and read are closing up, and those that are left and becoming harder to find.   It's sad and I already miss them.   If our world was created on a cartoon screen, I imagine the monstrous buildings rising from the ground in a rumbling tornado and blown away like Dorothy clutching Toto on her way to Oz. 

Don't you enjoy browsing from table to table turning the pages, reading the blurbs?

But today there are ebooks.

kindle

the nook

  They're still a minority though rising at a spectacular rate.  There’s the Kindle, of course, but also the nook, Kobo, Sony, and others, yet each type is incompatible with the other.  You can’t buy a book from one and play it on another brand.                     Wonderful.

Remember VHS and Beta Max?  That got resolved pretty quickly with VHS becoming the clear winner.   Not so here—unless of course, you buy an app that makes them compatible.

Are they kidding?
Are they thinking that anyone besides the nerds are going to work that hard?  Really most people just want to read a book, and Kindle’s already got three million available.  It looks like they’re winning the race, but don’t forget the IPAD. 

To date, Apple’s sold three hundred, twenty million of them, and one of their apps allows you to read any Kindle book you like.  Wow!

But is there ever going to be a time where we won't be able to turn an actual page?  Jeez, I hope not.  Babies under one are now playing with the IPAD, and three year olds are hooked!

Just think, you no longer have to lug six books for a two week hike in the woods.  Download the ones you want and carry them all in a few ounce reader, or download them as you go.

baby with IPad

                                                                              

But the best part of the e-readers is really for the writer. 

Publishing always meant months or maybe years of finding an agent, and if accepted, another wait for a publisher, and then production. Broadway could produce three shows on the road before a book gets lost on the shelf for the first time.

With ebooks, there still’s a procedure, but the middleman, the publisher is gone, and the number of new books seeing the light of day is overwhelming:  Short stories, poems, plays, and many odd tidbits that could never have gotten published before, are out there ready to go.  It has sparked the industry.  People are excited again.

Ebooks have become a paradigm, like nuclear energy.   After the bomb was dropped, the whole world was never the same again.

So I say, “Ebooks will never die.”  Like the Gettysburg Address has been repeated till eternity, so will my little truth.

And please tell everyone that Terry Neuman said it.