E-books, Old Dogs and New Tricks

One of my Christmas presents from my girlfriend, Sharon, was a Kindle e-book reader. Being an “old dog” who for the past half century has been a veracious reader of “tree books,” I approached my enjoyment of e-book-reading suspiciously. To my surprise and delight, however, I have been enjoying my Kindle immensely. Then a couple of weeks ago, I attended an excellent Florida Writers Association “E-book Publishing Workshop” conducted by my friend and fellow writer, Jim Swain, and left with my enthusiasm for e-books ratcheting onward and upward. This is the future!

Regarding some basics, an e-book is an electronic book (also e-book, ebook, digital book) is a text and image-based publication in digital form produced on, published by, and readable on computers or other digital devices. E-books were originally developed by Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.” Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, PG it is the oldest digital library. During our Workshop, moreover, Jim mentioned that:

• by 2009, sales of digital books were 2.5% of the book market;
• in September 2010, Publisher’s Weekly announced that sales of e-books in the United States had reached 8.5% of the total book market, representing the only growth segment in the book industry, worldwide; and,
• in November, 2010 Publisher’s Weekly reported that the sale of e-books will reach $1 billion by 2011, and may account for 50% of the total book market by 2015.

This indeed is the future!

My own relatively brief research on e-books revealed numerous websites and assorted information – such as poignant articles on advice and information; copyright resources; e-book compilers, promotions, readers and resellers; e-publisher services and associations; and web publishing. I also enjoyed a very interesting online article on “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write.”

As my fan-base readers know, three of my 27 published books are novels – romance novels involving assorted, pivotal and psychological aspects of loving relationships between a heroin and a hero, and interwoven with family issues, courtship, marriage and divorce, and single-parenting issues, among others, and spiced with wit, humor and what has been described as “subtle steamy sex.” Having the digital rights for such, I worked with an excellent e-book formatter, Michael Campbell, who did a superb job of formatting my three novels into Kindle and e-Pub formats. Then I posted the three novels on the Internet and they now are available from amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com:

· My Sweetpea Kindle NOOKbook

· Fear of Feeling Loved Kindle NOOKbook

· If Ever Again… It’ll be for Love Kindle NOOKbook

You also can see these three novels are now spotlighted on the first page of my Website: http://emenerbooks.com/default.aspx

I invite you to check them out… and remember: if you have a Kindle, you can download a Sample of each of these novels: if you don’t like what you’re reading, no harm, no foul; and if you like what you’re reading, you can purchase them (for about 20% of what they cost in their “tree book” versions).

In closing, let me remind you of something I have said on numerous occasions – verbally as well as in writing – something very pertinent to the essence of this blog:

“Old dogs are capable of learning new tricks…

sometimes it just takes a little longer.”

Ciao for now,

Bill