By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey and Jack Steel)
First, something of an apology, as real life has been rather
ganging up on me of late. Getting an Internet connection on board a ship is
never an easy thing to achieve and, because the link is provided by a satellite,
the download and upload speed is usually little better than dial-up, which
means there’s no real incentive to spend much time on the Web. So while I was
on board the Queen Mary 2, cruising
from Southampton to Hamburg, and then up to Honningsvaag on the northern tip of
Norway, I just gave lectures and wrote stuff for the next book, and didn’t
bother with much else.
Back on dry land, we’ve had a few problems as well,
trying to sort out various houses for reasons I won’t bore you with, because
they’re really not very interesting, and then, when I finally got to France and
should have had time to write an entry, I discovered that I had helpfully left
the power cable for my laptop in Andorra, a hot and sweaty six hour drive
south, so I’ve been out of e-mail contact for almost two weeks while I found
one on eBay, using my wife’s netbook, and could get it sent out to my address
here. Anyway, it arrived today, just in time for me to write this, so thank you
to all_mobilecompaccessories2010 for such a prompt and efficient service.
Leigh Russell
has already touched on this topic in her contribution to this blog, but I
thought I’d expand on it somewhat.
About a
week ago, to coincide with the second anniversary of the launch of the Kindle
in the United Kingdom, Amazon UK announced that it was now selling more ebooks
than paperback and hardback books combined. The figure the company came up with
is that for every 100 printed books sold, Amazon sells 114 ebooks. This statistic
is specific to Amazon in Britain, and does not necessarily reflect the balance
between printed and electronic books bought from any other outlet.
The Kindle
became the bestselling product on Amazon within just a few months of its
launch, and is still selling extremely well, because it’s very good at what it
does, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. It’s not the only electronic
reader, of course, but it is far and away the most popular. One reason for the
success of these devices is the huge number of sales of novels like Fifty Shades of Grey, some 2 million of
which were apparently sold by Amazon in under four months.
I’ve read
elsewhere that this book is a contender for both the title of ‘fastest selling
novel of all time’ and ‘worst novel of all time’, though because I haven’t read
it – and have no intention of doing so – I’m not qualified to comment on the
latter opinion. One reason for the success of this book and its kin is arguably
the fact that women – and it is aimed squarely at this section of the market –
can read it on the Kindle without anybody knowing that they’re immersed in a
racy and semi-pornographic novel. Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite to
one reason given for the success of The
Da Vinci Code, which was undeniably a dreadful book, and which was supposed
to be popular precisely because it had the words ‘Da Vinci’ on its cover.
Another reason
for the success of the electronic side of Amazon is self-publishing, and the
company states that it has seen a 400% increase in the use of Kindle Direct
Publishing over the past year.
But perhaps one of the most important – and encouraging
– pieces of data released by Amazon is that, according to the company’s figures,
the average Kindle owner buys four times more books than people who only buy
printed versions. I’d agree with that, because it’s certainly true for me.
Precisely because I can buy between three and four cheap Kindle downloads for
the price of one paperback, and have them delivered in a matter of seconds, I
tend to cruise the bestseller lists and buy books in clumps, or whatever the
correct mass noun is for more than one book.
And, because each of them costs less than a cup of
coffee, even if I decide they’re complete rubbish it really doesn’t matter. And
while it’s true that most self-published books have been turned into Kindle
downloads precisely because they’re nowhere near good enough for any commercial
publisher to even consider, most of the ones I have bought are quite readable. I reckon
that out of every 10 Kindle books I buy, one or two will be unreadably bad, one
will probably be of publishable standard, and the rest will fall somewhere
between these two extremes.
So although the publishing world is in something of a
crisis at the moment, not really knowing what to do for the best and how to
cope with the rise of the ebook, we can at least take comfort in the fact that
the future of reading looks as bright as it ever did, even if the medium which
is used to display the type on the page has changed dramatically.
You can contact me at:
www.James-Becker.com
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