Don’t miss today’s Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert: Cybill Shepherd Tells All You’d Ever Want to Know, and More, plus … Will the Pope be sorry for opting out of the concordat with the Templar Knights? Find out in Terrence O’Brien’s gripping The Templar Concordat (Today’s Sponsor)
By Tom Dulaney, Contributing Reporter
Book lovers have much to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving, including so many things that were not in our lives a year ago:
We aren’t enslaved to a particular reading device, thanks to Amazon.com’s continuing rollout of apps letting us read our ebooks on everything from iPad, the new kid in eBook reading, to the Kindle, the father of the ebook revolution in many ways. (Kindle wasn’t the first eBook reader, but it’s the one that caught the world’s attention.)
Our reading horizons are stretching wide, wider, widest. Again, Amazon gets the lion’s share of the credit here, for several reasons:
- New titles from great authors. Just this week, Amazon announced acquiring 121 titles for their Kindle Store from The Toby Press. That brings some of the finest overseas authors to US readers–in English.
- New ebooks for our kids, like the just-added. Rainbow Magic series from Daisy Meadows
- New authors. With its Digital Text Publishing (DTP) that makes publishing a book a snap, we readers can discover new authors. These budding writers get a chance they never had before ebooks and DTP.
- Bestselling author bargains. The A-list of popular authors, including the everywhere present James Patterson, lets us sample huge chunks of their upcoming books. Sometimes, they give us one of their older books, a get-to-know-you marketing method that, nevertheless, gives us a great read at a great price.
- A mountain of books to choose from. Our options range from Gutenberg.org and other such sites, with towering lists of classics now downloadable for free. Plus, Amazon–again way out ahead–now offers us 750,000 ebooks, and the number is only going up.
- Bargain pricing–much of the time, but not all of the time. A strong contingent of ebook buyers expect their ebooks to cost less than the printed book. That argument rages on, and no one really knows if a general policy will settle into place.
- And more…from saving trees, cutting distribution costs, leaving room in our homes that piles of books used to take, and so on.
At the other end of the “famous author” spectrum are authors whose names are new to most of us. A great example of the “Kindle-made” author is Boyd Morrison. He couldn’t get a “yes” from a publisher, so he published to his web site and Amazon via DTP. Sales took off, and Simon & Schuster revisited.
And there’s much more in the new author pen. J.A. Konrath is gaining fame as an author coming at publishing from his own unique direction. He shook things up with Shaken this fall, giving 75% of it away, betting readers would pay $2.99 to reward the author–and find out what happened.
Happy Thanksgiving.
