Random E-Book Stories

I find that I have bookmarked a lot of news items and pieces of commentary about e-books and Amazon this week.  Rather than write a full post about every single one of them, I thought I would share all of them at once.


A Dark Day for the Future of Books from CNN.com

This one is mostly about the agency pricing model; I'll admit to not having paid a lot of attention to it because business news just sort of makes my eyes glaze over.  Towards the end there's a discussion about the role of big publishing houses.  It's kind of a catch-22.  If you hire your own editor and cover artist and do your own marketing and so forth, you can keep more of the revenue from your book.  But if you're an impoverished aspiring novelist like myself, the big publishing house has a lot of resources that you don't have to shell out, up front.

Even E-Readers Still Like Printed Books, Survey Finds from the Los Angeles Times

Here, the title is pretty much self-explanatory.

Amazon is Full of Knock-Off Books from the seattlepi.com blog

I've posted about fake books before; then, it was mostly about printouts from Wikipedia.  It seems there are a lot of self-published books on Amazon now, that have titles perilously close to titles of well-known books.  Like they're hoping to catch people not paying attention.  I'd like to think I'm not that dumb.  But then, I never order with one click, and I am usually giving online shopping my full attention.

Kindle Books: Does Low Price Mean Low Quality? from The Huffington Post

This is mostly a defense of low pricing of Kindle books, from the perspective of an author who is looking to introduce more readers to his work.  Couple of sentences I'd edit in there ("...they have been able to enjoy well written stories that their children have enjoyed..." for example).  But the author of the piece makes a good point; I actually figured his reasons for pricing his books low were the same reason a lot of books are priced low -- to attract new readers.  (I do wonder about the author's pointing to reviews by Top 50 reviewers, although I guess the Klausner-bot is no longer in the top 50.  And at least some of the people who are, now, have more reasonable numbers of reviews to their credit.)

Okay, think that's all for this post.  Time to feed the cats.