I’ve got a book uploaded to Smashwords.com! It cost me some time, but no cash. Take a look at Trespassers– and tell me what you think! We’re going to put up more books from Hamilton Stone if this seems worth the trouble.
Archive for March, 2010
Smashed!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010Smashing a book
Saturday, March 27th, 2010I’m working on an experiment with a Hamilton Stone Editions version of one of my books. Using a site called Smashwords , I’m rather painstakingly turning a word processed manuscript (already published in hard copy) into a format that Smashwords will then run through some software called The Meatgrinder, and spew out the other end several versions readable by Kindle, the Nook, and more. Everything from EPUB to .pdf.
There is no charge upfront, and the service is not exclusive, as best I can read their information. The publisher/writer gets back a little if anyone buys/downloads a book. On the other hand, you don’t own the files in the specially formatted versions.
So the experiment is, does this work? Is it worth the labor (my favorite phrase: Is the Game Worth the Candle?), and will anyone conceivably buy the books?
If anyone has any experience with Smashwords, please let me know! Most of their books appear to be self-published single book deals, lots of science fiction and other genre, but more and more small publishers seem to be using it. This is, in my mind, a stop gap, something to do while things sort themselves out.
But I want our books available to read once I buy an e-reader!
“An unusually dense wallpaper”
Thursday, March 18th, 2010Thanks to Shelley Ettinger (see her blog Read Red) for this link: an amusing article about moving one’s books and what the future will be like with no boxes of dusty paperbacks.
Niffenegger won’t go electronic!
Friday, March 12th, 2010I just read Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time-Traveler’s Wife , a really good love story with a two hanky ending. Of course, it’s also speculative fiction, and clever, and all that, but mainly, it’s love, with the tiniest hint of pedophilia that no one could object to. Niffenegger herself is an artist and art teacher, and on her web site there are FAQ’s that include a question about why her books aren’t available as e-books, and she explains that as someone who creates books as physical objects as an artist as well as writing them, she on principle insists that her books remain objects. As an artist, she makes a good point. For me, it has never been the books, although I’ve always loved illustrations, but rather the trip: you go in that place and go far, far away. So I’m anything but doctrinaire about the object, having always preferred paperbacks, for example, to hardcovers.
My First Electronic Book…
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010I have a new book coming out in the summer from Ohio University Press , and they’ve already got a nice page set up for it, Out of the Mountains, with a link to this blog, and the opportunity to pre-order– and one of the versions to pre-order, along with a hard cover and a soft cover version, is an electronic file! It’s just a .pdf, at least so far, but that’s a start.
Reading More into the Future of Reading
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Riding the train into New York last evening to teach my NYU novel writing class, I was wishing for an e-reader, as I often do (I was already carrying my little Acer netbook so I could check email later). Then– as I even more often do, I drifted into a nap, so I don’t know if the desire for all the books in my library in my hand at every moment was just part of a pleasant dream or a real plan.
The irony of course is the hundreds of people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).
She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine . This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading: the instant hard copy books but also e-books (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950′s!). I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books– I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books. Nice, don’t you think? Or at any rate, not bad.
Universities have been picking up on the possibility of instant books much faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010 New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet. See my article reviewing The Business of Books.