About

It is a fascinating time to be in the business of books with many new opportunities opening up.

ePublishing is a new frontier as the industries of language meet the 
revolution of internet technology. Amazon’s Kindle, the Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony’s eReader and Apple’s bullish marketing of the iPad + iBooks combination all vie for this significant new market, with Blackberry and Google coming along fast behind.

How this will ultimately impact on the nature of readable content 
remains to be seen, so early are we in the uptake of eBooks. With rival 
companies producing competing formats, newspaper, magazine and book 
publishers will evolve or die. At the moment it seems that it has boosted long form reading in general.

There is an impact also on authors, who are able to self-publish and self-promote using the internet, using well-established social networks, blogging and podcasting to put together sophisticated cross-media marketing campaigns.

We are seeing the beginning of the same revolution which already hit the various music industries. Just as audio files replaced CDs and forced a huge shakeup in the way the recording industry works, big, traditional book publishing houses will not be needed for warehousing and distribution of physical objects, and the means of production and distribution is now available to the creators, who for the first time do not require paper, printing press or transport. Bookshops are already being wiped out by Amazon, but the amount of writing available, and the diversity, if not the quality, has increased, and this is likely to continue as the barriers to gaining readerships fall and more would-be authors enter the market.

In the short to to medium term, publishers, embedded in old media, still control the oxygen of publicity and authors who maintain good relationships with them are far more likely to become successful. New kinds of publishing houses are emerging however, whose start point is low overheads, fast turnaround, and the kind of flexibility that oil tanker-sized corporations do not have.

If you’re wary of hype, follow the news as it happens and make your own mind up. I suggest Len Edgerly’s excellent podcast ‘The Kindle Chronicles’.

Len is a creative writer, and his fellow practitioner’s attitude along with his relaxed tone gives his podcasts a well-formed and fluent style which makes them both easy to follow and truly informative.

UK-based ‘Paper Not Included’ is group blog which includes Brian Kellett, aka Tom Reynolds, author of ‘Blood, Sweat and Tea’.

Both of these excellent resources cover the rapidly developing field of eBooks.