Blogger: Michelle Ule
Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.
My husband bought me a Kindle for Christmas thirteen months ago, and he, a nuclear engineer, has enjoyed it ever since. He loves the access the electronic reader has given him to very old, out of print, hard to find, works of literature.
And the price? Perfect.
He started with Jane Austen. Once he finished rereading her entire canon, he looked up Sir Walter Scott. Imagine! Scott’s entire works for $4.96–250 manuscripts! How could he pass them up? He read them all.
(The last time he read Sir Walter Scott, he checked them out of the Hawaii public library. One book was an 1898 first edition! )
I couldn’t believe it when he turned up The Mysteries of Udolpho–Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 opus that inspired Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. I had tried to find it in libraries many times. He downloaded the book within minutes, for free.
“How do you like it?” I asked as he sat in the lounger beside the fire.
“This girl starts each chapter in tears. It’s ridiculous.”
No wonder Jane Austen parodied the gothic novel.
We’re in an interesting time when it comes to the availability of literature. Between googlebooks and the Kindle, readers have an ever-increasing electronic library at their fingertips. I’ve been able to read genealogical texts on my computer I couldn’t even locate before.
But as a writer, I see the major downside. My teenage daughter contemptuously argues, “By the time I’m an adult all information will be free.” The Scriptures tell us “A workman is worthy of his hire,” and I believe that is true of writers.
I love being able to access books on the computer, but I limit myself to out-of-copyright materials, or books I can’t find any other way. Still, Kindle and it’s library of old books is very, very tempting.
What’s your take on the price of books online and on e-readers?
Michelle, thanks for this post.
I don’t want to be a Whig (or do I mean Tory?), clinging to a doomed past, but when eighty percent of my book was posted on Google Books, I flipped out. Then I learned my publisher had done that for marketing’s sake. I have directed people to that site, but I’m not sure of the benefits.
Google argues that they give potential buyers the same opportunity they would have in a store: to flip through the book before they buy it.
I see a couple problems w/that premise:
1. In a store, time is limited. You’re not staying overnight, and you won’t hang out with the book for hours on end. You’ll flip through, and either buy it or set it down. (Yeah, people read all day at BN, but that’s still not the norm). Google books allows you to linger all day long and all night long and forever with someone else’s labor.
2. In a store, you can’t cut, copy, paste, or search for relevant paragraphs. You have to flip. You’re stuck with a linear approach to a book… page to page. Google books allows a complete search. Find what you want from the book, copy it, and move on to the next book, no purchase required.
iTunes is smart enough to embed digital rights management code into music. The literary world needs to figure out how to make that happen.
I have no problem with public domain works being made available for free — especially when the scanned copies have cool old pencil markings and librarian stamps. Now, we just need to digitize the old book smell…
Loving the brave new world…
Bill Giovannetti
How To Keep Your Inner Mess From Trashing Your Outer World… mostly free at Google Books: http://bit.ly/4Qy4ce
You make excellent points as usual, Bill, and certainly we agree with you.
If it’s in print and for sale, it shouldn’t be available on line. I don’t see anything questionable about that line of argument.
But as a PhD, you would understand completely how much easier it is to do research now than in the old days. 🙂
I’m a writer…but I can’t help but “covet” the Kindle.
I write this from a biased point of view. Never having held the Kindle, I can’t speak for its benefits and therefore hold fast to my love of holding a real live book in my hand.
I got a Sony Reader for Christmas. It doesn’t come with books but I’ve downloaded classics for $.99 each. My book, The Peril of the Sinister Scientist is available on Kindle at a cheaper price than the hard copy, but it doesn’t cost as much to produce. I don’t think e-books will harm writers in the long run. In a few years we’ll realize that, like computers, replacing parts and buying updated ones costs at least as much as buying hard copies of books.
It seems to me that if royalties are based on the price of print, or represent a higher percentage (since e-books don’t have all the paper, ink and shipping costs) then it should be possible for us to make a decent living. I love the idea of a whole library in handheld form, but I DO feel guilty that I get all my news from electronic sources and don’t pay for a newspaper or magazine. Someone has to pay the reporters or that news source is going to dry up.
You don’t need a Kindle, or to spend any money, to read those old, classic ebooks. The Gutenberg Project has been making them available for free for over a decade now. (Long before Google started – and all legal PUBLIC DOMAIN books.)
I used to read classics on my Palm, but now I read them on my iPod Touch, or on a netbook. (I also buy ebooks – especially from Fictionwise.)
I might be interested in a Kindle when publishers have a better understanding of the economics of reading. Books have been traditionally priced high not just because they are expensive to print and ship and warehouse, but because they are durable and can be shared. eBooks should be a lot cheaper than they are now, and imho, they will not be truly successful until they are.