Readers, E and Otherwise

I lost my grip on the readers' conversation in the comments on the last post because I was fixated on the writers. And I'm still fixated on the writers: Barb and I are going to do a chat tonight and cross-post the transcript on our blogs so we can talk about digital publishing by writers in more depth, probably on Wednesday.

But for right now, I want to look at the reader comments.

RSmith said:

I love my ebook reader so much that I am one of those people who pay extra for the ebook when I know I can get the print book at Walmart cheaper. But I am not willing to pay money for a self published ebook unless it is an author I am familiar with. I have purchased some awful books from the big publishers, but I am more willing to trust a book from them than something completely unknown.

This is the flip side of gatekeeping. It's incredibly frustrating for writers to have go through print publishers in order to get their work to a paying readership, but the paying readership may trust the gatekeepers to filter out the bad stuff so they don't have to. It's a flawed system because bad stuff is published in print all the time and good stuff gets rejected, and even the idea of "bad stuff" and "good stuff" is subjective. So the next question for the writer interested in publishing her own work is, "How do I get the reader to trust me long enough to buy my book?" A track record in print publishing is a good start, but what if I'm a new author? Is the sample enough to overcome the distrust?

Micki said:

Maybe there will have to be trusted review sites that consolidate the self-e-pub reviews in one place — with reader comments. I know this system could be abused, but it could also mean a lot of publicity.

Do we want to put self-digital-publishing in a separate review box? One of the things that Barb talked about off-list was the disdain that a lot of people have for both self-publishing books (couldn't get a publisher, huh?) and e-books (oh, anybody can get published in those), so that when you combine them into self-e-publishing (a term she really doesn't like) you get the worst of all worlds. But it's pretty clear that author digital publishing (trying for a different term here) can be wildly successful, so much so that a lot of established writers are trying it. I can see putting e-books in a separate category the way hardcovers are reviewed in different venues than paperbacks, but even that feels old-school. Still, if there were a separate site for author-digital-publishing (aka self-published-e-books), would that make it more likely for you to find and buy books?

Julie said:

I don't own an e-reader, and most likely never will. I don't read very many things on line that I can read "in person" (blogs are their own category, to me, and yeah, I'm "special" -all over the damn place). If I have something on the screen that is more than two pages long, I'll print it (use only soy-based inks in recycled/refilled cartridges, on the backs of already recycled paper). I hope the printed books never go away, I'd be shit out of luck. As I am nearly now, with neighborhood video stores.

I'm completely sold on e-reading except for picture books or coffee table books, books that are more than just print on the page, but I'm keeping my print fiction, too (although the mass market editions are falling apart in my hands). I completely understand the "I want to hold a book in my hands" people. My question is, how annoyed are you hands-on-book people going to be if you want to read something that's only in e-format? Are you going to shrug, get mad at the author, or find a way to read it on a screen?

Flamingo Cherry said:

I'm a big fan of downloading the free samples; you usually get a couple of chapters for a novel to see if the writer is at all competent before you have to pay. There's always the chance that you'll get good writing but discover you just don't like the story halfway in, but that happens to me with print books, too, and I don't feel as bad about not finishing if I've only paid $3.

I do the same thing: I pretty much only hit the "Buy" button if I really want to turn the next page. I think it's one of the big pluses of e-reading; a good healthy sample before you buy and then the opportunity to buy and get the rest of the book immediately. So the sample is going to be a big decider in whether you click "Buy" or not, but how do you get people to the sample?There has to be a way to use those sample chapters as hooks for the e-reader beyond "I clicked on the book and got a sample." I could see a site that was all first paragraphs or even just first lines. You scan the list, you see something that grabs you, you click on that and get taken to the book page and the free sample.

Flamingo Cherry also said:

In some ways, I actually find it's becoming easier to "investigate" the quality of a book from an "unknown" author through the e-book world, because there is so much information right there in one place, and once you get comfortable with the format of Amazon/Kindle's or B&N's or iBookstore's market place, it's pretty easy to navigate.

I'm finding this, too, but one of the drawbacks of the iBookstore is that not everything I want is in iBook format. I have the Kindle app on my iPad but I'm stubbornly resisting using it because I like the convenience of dealing only with iBooks. Is anybody else having problems reading across the platforms–Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc.?

Jackie said:

"I am a new ereader – I got an iPad for xmas. I hust made the discovery (personal dicovery – it was probably obvieous to others long since) That I could buy the flashy new books of my favorites in ebooks rather than hard cover – a format I rarely buy except for truly beautiful books (i.e. the art of book binding, printing) and then still get the MM paperback when it came out for my purse or the tub or the bus. This is much better. I may be able to find anything in my room past the books…."

I have to admit I was surprised when SMP put out the e-book at the same time as the hardcover. It seemed to me that would undercut hardcover sales, and half the sale were in e-book, not HC. But looking back, I don't think it did undercut it. I think the people who like hardcovers bought it in hardcover and the people who like their e-readers bought it that way, and people who didn't want to wait for the paperback picked the one of the two that was most appealing to them. It gives people options, and I like that.

AgTigress wrote:

I can envisage being quite willing to do my regular re-reading of Heyer, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers etc. on an electronic screen, but even if they brought out an e-reader with a 12″ x 8″ format, superb colour resolution, and sophisticated tricks to enable one to look at text, footnote and bibliographic reference simultaneously, while writing a quick annotation in the margin and searching in the index (all of which are undoubtedly possible), books are still going to last much longer because they are not dependent of changing technologies. I regularly use books that were published long before I was born. As someone commented above, the computer technology we were using even 20 years ago is now obsolete.

This is something we haven't talked about much but it's a really good point. We're in Betamax territory right now and things are going to change radically. When I think of all the stuff I lost because I saved it on floppy disk, I begin to worry about my library. I'm sure publishers will update the books to match the new technology, but does that mean I'll have to download all those books again? Even if it's for free (and it better be if I've paid for it once), that's a real PITA. Meanwhile, as Ag says, the book's pretty much reached it's perfect state on paper and isn't likely to change much. And I have noticed that the books I'm duplicating on my iPad for convenience's sake I'm not discarding from my shelves. It's the old belt-and-suspenders plan: both e and paper formats so no matter what happens, I'll always have Heyer and Pratchett.

I'm really interested in all of this because at the end of the day, readers are going to decide what happens in publishing. They always do. So while writers are guessing and experimenting, readers are the ones making the final call here.