Read a 900 page Victorian novel on my Blackberry? No thank you.
We’ve known for some time that the way we consume media is rapidly changing due to changing technologies, and books are no exception. I can’t foresee myself wanting to read novels on the computer or hand held devices, but book mega-companies are moving in that direction in order to stay relevant in this digital age.
On February 25, Indigo Books and Music launched Shortcovers – an application that enables users to buy and download e-books to the BlackBerry Storm, Apple iPhone and iPod Touch as well as via computer. At its launch, 50,000 books were available for sale at prices ranging from $4.99-$19.00 as well as individual chapters for sale for 99¢ each. There are also sample chapters available for free. Eventually, the application will be able to recommend titles to users based on their former reading choices and habits.
I don’t have a BlackBerry or iPhone, so I couldn’t try out the application – if you’ve tried it please comment and let us know your experience with Shortcovers!
I don’t think that the book will ever die, but a large part of why I think that is because the book is portable and you can read anywhere. E-books on hand-held devices allow readers to do this as well. Do you think that this new technology will take off? Would you curl in the coffee shop or in the park and read Dickens – on your iPod (Bleak House, the 900 page Victorian novel mentioned above, is available for digital purchase)? Would you pay $19 for a book you could buy in print for the same price or cheaper?
One aspect of Shortcovers that I am really excited about is that authors can submit their books to the site to be offered to users for free or 99¢ per chapter. This could revolutionize the publishing industry by enabling aspiring authors to “publish” their works without needing a publisher’s support. Evidently, anyone can write things online and reach a wide audience, but the idea of putting one’s book for sale to a presumably wide reading audience is a novel idea. I am excited to see if this helps aspiring authors break into the industry and give us more variety in our choices.
So, have you tried Shortcovers? What do you think about reading on the computer or hand-held device? Will e-books ever be more popular than good ol’ fashioned books?
I don’t have the answers, but I will keep you posted!
-Alison
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Hi Alison, I will respond to your blog by saying that I have recently managed to garner a fair quanitity of e-literature from user-based torrent sites. Though I have in the past had difficulty justifying such practices, I find that books in .pdf format tend to have a much lesser degree of marketplace allure. Not only does an e-text fail to occupy the traditional 1-2" width space on a book shelf, it is also a somewhat more difficult to read from an electronic monitor for extended periods of time, as well as requiring a more stationary reader (as opposed to a reader free to roam the world without a computer).
ReplyDeleteAll of that said, I still have not hesitated to find a stack of Vonnegut, Bukowski, Atwood, even Plato, online. I don't reference them nearly as much as I do my print resources. But it's good to have them, and in this case, the price was most definitely right!
As for the itunes-like Shortcovers described above, I think it is a great innovation to begin selling chapters at a buck apiece (or perhaps slightly less, depending on quanitity, etc). I don't predict it taking off in quite the same way as itunes, but it does present us with one wonderful print alternative as we move into the daunting 21st Century.
-Tristan