Good news for writers and publishers

Amazon guru Jeff Bezos has given us Kindle.

With the introduction of the Amazon Kindle, e-books are finally about to arrive in quantity. Why should writers and publishers be happy? For the first time since the advent of the internet, newly released books will not be immediately available in used form. In fact, new books in electronic form will NEVER be available to resellers. This is an important development because on-line resellers absolutley slam sales of new print copies. If paper books go away, so will this very serious problem.

When a publisher lays out $20-50,000 to acquire and produce a book, there should be a period during which they have exclusive ability to market the product. Unitl the net, this used to be true. Today, every book shares its page with its worst enemy, the resellers, and must compete with essentially the same product offered for as little as one cent plus shipping and handling. Go to any book's Amazon page. You will find links to resellers offering used copies. Author and publisher earn only when a new copy sells. If used books comprise half of all sales of books in print, selling through a first printing becomes 100% less likely. As witnessed by the number of resellers lining up, it’s clear the problem has reached epidemic proportion. We may have reached the point where it’s entirely possible for a book to be a best seller without the author or publisher knowing.

Trade in used books is perfectly legal, but with the advent of the internet the character of the business turned on traditional publishers. Used book stores specialize in rare, unusual and out of print volumes that often sell for many multiples of the original cover price. Today, they've added a new element to the mix. Your book is sold at no profit and the shipping and handling fee produces the $4-5 margin for the seller. Not much, but better than a kick in the knee on a day when nothing rare or unusual is sold.

Here’s why writers and publishers should rejoice at the arrival of Kindle. When Kindle becomes universal, the supply of used books is bound to dwindle. This will push the price of paper books up, and the trade in used books will retreat to its former role. True, the corrected balance will be artificial and dependent on the whim of the folks at Amazon, a force so huge as to be beyond most of us. An additional long overdue benefit; authors and publishers will finally be paid each and every time a copy of their work is downloaded, because there is no way to buy or sell the electronic data inside a Kindle.

Will the Kindle live up to its promise? E-novels have been around quite a while, more than long enough for the gloss of low cost and easy accessibility to wear off. Despite being hailed in the beginning, and a rash of colorful startups, e-books have so far failed to capture the reading public’s imagination. Adults who’ve learned to do their reading while seated in a comfortable chair or curled up on a sofa, find it awkward to sit at a desk, or in the case of laptops, balance the device somehow in reading position. Add to this awkwardness the fact that reading on a CRT can be unusually fatiguing, and you have a formula for failure.

Although it was recognized early on that e-publishing as an industry could not thrive in the absence of affordable  “readers”, devices small and light enough to permit easy handling, storage, and operation, no worthy product found its way to the market. Many prototypes have been announced, but up to now none have proven viable in the marketplace.

All that changed with the 2007 introduction of “Kindle.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went out and bought the best of the competition and addressed each and every one of the stumbling blocks others stumbled over:

COST : a Kindle sells for $399 delivered. At first, this seems high, but the price includes permanent unlimited access from virtually anywhere. There is no monthly fee. One price, and it’s yours to use forever. Compare this with your monthly cell phone bill. That $399 just shrunk a whole lot, didn’t it. By comparison, the Kindle is inexpensive.

READER FATIGUE: Kindle readers have a screen that simulates paper and ink. Readers vow that within a few pages they forget they are not reading the real thing.

DIFFICULT TO HANDLE: weight – 10 oz. About the same as the average paperback.

TITLE SELECTION: Amazon is the world’s biggest bookstore. Every NY Times Bestseller is available as well as nearly 100,000 current titles, not to mention newspapers, blogs, magazines. You get access to it all. Of course, periodicals will bill your credit card for access, just as you need to pay for the reading material you choose.

PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE: I had to wait four weeks for my Kindle. When they’re selling faster than they can be produced, you know something good is on its way to happening.

If this sounds like a commercial for the Kindle, let me assure you it’s not. Authors and publishers have been waiting a long time for the chance to earn a royalty each time their book is sold. From my vantage point, it looks like that time has finally come. You can bet your house that by the end of 2008, there will be 1,000,000 Kindles in use, and as many titles waiting to be downloaded. I sincerely hope mine will be among them.

Art Tirrell is the author of 2007's best adventure novel, The Secret Ever Keeps.

“Simply put…the best underwater scenes I’ve ever read.”