This flow chart looks chaotic, but probably leads to Zen…

It’s the Baltimore Book Festival and it’s next weekend! I’ll be there, and if you’re an aspiring author, you should be there too.

Today I have the honor of hosting a guest post from Carmen Webster Buxton, an early adopter of eBook technology who has gone on to become an authoritative source of news for all things eReader. We’d all be wise to listen to what she has to say. And as a bonus, Carmen will choose one lucky commenter on this post to win a free Smashwords or Kindle copy of her latest book.

---

eBooks: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

by

Carmen Webster Buxton

The last two years have seen explosive growth in digital publishing for books, shifting an industry that hadnít really changed much over the last half century. The tipping point for change began when Amazon introduced the Kindle. The Sony Reader had beat them to the punch as far as providing a good quality e-ink screen; if you’re not familiar with it, an e-ink screen resembles a printed page, black text on light gray. Because it’s not backlit there is less chance of eyestrain, and, as a side benefit, the battery lasts a long time (days or even weeks) on a charge. A lot of ebook readers prefer e-ink to LCD for long-form reading for those reasons. But in spite of the screen, the Sony Reader didn’t sell that well. It didn’t offer wireless connectivity, and Sony didn’t have much of an ebookstore. The Kindle was simpler to use, and offered a lot more books; it caught on and inspired a plethora of competition, including the Nook (and later the Nook Color) from Barnes & Noble.

Next, Amazon and Barnes & Noble began offering applications (apps) that let you buy and read Kindle and Nook books on smart phones, PCs, and Macs. You didn’t need a dedicated (single-purpose) ereader to read ebooks. When Apple came out with the iPad, that also helped push digital publishing forward. Apple opened its own iBooks store, and other companies made ereader apps for the iPad. Having ereader apps available captured the occasional reader. No one buys a dedicated ereader if they only read four or five books a year, but if you already have a shiny new iPad, why not also use it to read those four or five books? Besides, the color LCD screen on iPads, tablets, and laptops are big enough to also display magazines and even comic books. Digital reading grew even more.

That’s the good. The bad is, between ebooks and online sales of print books, bookstores are dying left and right. My hope is that the weakening of the giant chains will leave some breathing room for small independent bookstores. The chains could beat the indies on price and selection, but online can beat the chains on those things. What the indies can offer—knowledgeable staff, atmosphere, readings and other author events—online can’t do. Besides, another new technology, print on demand (POD) offers hope that bookstores could eventually print books on site, a more viable selling model for a store than having to keep shelves full of the books they hope people will want to buy. Right now POD machines are too expensive for most small stores, but as they come down in price, we could see more of them.

And the ugly? Well, for a while that was ebooks themselves. Publishers are still working out the kinks in their workflows. At first they simply converted the PDF they used to send to the printer to create the ebook version. Using that file had the advantage of having all the last minute corrections in it, but the conversion didn’t always translate the printed page into the correct ebook layout. Paragraphs sometimes ran together, and words hyphenated for line length ended up in the ebook looking like this: hyphen- ation. Alternatively, publishers would use the MS Word files that authors had submitted, which didn’t have all the typos corrected. This also produced bad results, for obvious reasons. Finally, as ebook sales grew, publishers began to pay attention to their digital products and workflows. You still see occasional problems, but it’s much better than it was.

The final development combines good, bad, and ugly into one huge ball. That’s self-publishing. Because ebooks are always sold online, writers can self-publish without having to cart boxes of books around to bookstores, pleading for shelf space. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer easy-to-use self-publishing platforms that put those ebooks into their stores right along with traditionally published books. Companies like Smashwords offer only self-published books. What this development means is that anyone can publish a book. And that’s good in a way, because it gives writers a chance to find a readership without having to find an agent and/or editor whose taste matches what they write. But it’s bad, too, because no one is imposing any quality control on self-published books. Some self-published writers get feedback, and hire editors and cover artists, and others operate strictly on their own, and it shows when you start reading their books— really ugly! The only reason self-published books are worth checking out is another great thing about ebooks—the free sample. When you look at Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Amazon or other online ebook retailers, they almost invariably (for novels, anyway) offer a free sample that you can download or read online. Truly ugly books are obvious on page 1, and you have about 10 to 20% of the book to tell if you will like the story or not. It’s a wonderful feature.

Of course, some people love their print books and have no interest in changing over to reading on an ereader or multi-purpose device. That’s just fine. I don’t think print is going away any time soon. eReaders have gone mainstream, but they aren’t yet ubiquitous enough to replace the print market.

But we definitely live in exciting times where books are concerned! In fact, it’s getting harder and harder to write far future science fiction because our technology now is catching up to some of our classic science fiction. I have “book readers” in some of my books that can use energy from the human reader’s hands to power the screen, and can translate the text into any language desired. That’s one reason I like to include a love story in most of my books. I am pretty sure falling in love won’t change as much as ereader technology will.

---

Carmen Webster Buxton lives in Rockville, MD with her husband, her daughter, and an elderly beagle that has his own pet cat. She writes science fiction and fantasy novels, and currently has two books available as ebooks on the Kindle, Nook, Smashword, and iBooks platforms. A third novel should follow soon. Links to buy her books are available on her blog Carmen’s Page.

This graphic tickles me because tonight I presented “Love, Monsters & Mythology: For Romance Writers” to my Maryland chapter. I think it went pretty well! I need to tweak some of the exercises to cater to beta heroes and to better help writers use mythology to bring out the themes in their writing, but it seems to have been a good start. A few folks told me that it got them back into the scenes they were writing and was helpful, so I’m feeling pretty great about that!