Thursday, June 5, 2008

Going Digital?

IN THE NEWS: "See Below."


Wow. I must be bored. I so rarely "talk" about news. Normally, I usually just throw info out there and let people do with it what they want.


Ah-ha! Not today! Lucky you!

I thought this was interesting article from the Dallas News.com. In it, it stressed these two little tidbits of info:

"Exhibit A: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that for books that come in both paper and electronic forms, e-books account for 6 percent of unit sales.

Exhibit B: Publishers Weekly reports that e-book sales are up four times over Penguin."

It's taken awhile for e-books to gain in popularity--if you can call them popular. Trust me. They aren't. But--as an electronic published writer--I find this article encouraging. I'm even becoming one of the statistics. I've finally reached the point where I want am looking at buying an e-reader. I'm not sure what kind, maybe Kindle or Sony. (Still waiting for Kindle to go down a bit more in price)

I can't take it anymore. I have paper books cluttering my office space, my book shelves, and my nightstand. It's getting to me. I'd like to store them in a nice compact space and out of the way--like in a hand held device. I don't have to worry because I can even get my Harlequin books digital now, too.

Living in a electronic age, information about digital books has been slow. But a financial representative I know actually had someone come into their office a few weeks ago and wanted to buy some Amazon stock because he had read about the Kindle and thought there was a future in it.

Unfortunately, we really don't know how "big" a future it will be.

5 comments:

Chicki Brown said...

I think all forms of digital entertainment are only going to grow as time goes on, particularly because younger people have a different mindset. They want small and convenient albeit expensive.

The idea of downloading several books to a device agrees with me because I also am running out of space. If I buy another bookcase I won't have room for regular furniture!

Anonymous said...

I'm betting there is a future in the electronic book world - it just might be slow on the uptake. But I read on my Palm Tungsten E2 and love it (because I love the multi-functionality) - But it is smaller thatn the e-readers.

I also like being able to shop in my PJs at all hours of the day or night and not have to fill up gas take to get to the store!

Stephanie said...

Sounds interesting! The only drawback for me is I wouldn't want to stare at a computer screen to read, especially after writing for any length of time. But it's definitely the wave of the future! I can't see "paper" being around too much longer the way everything is becoming lately!

MsSnarkyPants said...

I used to want to keep a copy of every single book I'd ever read...The older I get the more the mountains of books have grown, but I still never know if I'm gonna wanna yank out this or that book again and read it. So I *big puffy pink heart* ebooks! They are the best! I'd love one of those spiffy ebook readers that actually downloads the days copy of the newspaper for you every morning too! Not that I actually read the newspaper, but I might read it instead of going to cnn.com if I had one of those. The concept is just so cool, and the greenness of it appeals to me. :-D

racer said...

Jennifer,

Thanks for you kind comments on my blog, My Writing Life. I'm very happy to exchange links with you and got yours up and running. Keep up the great work.

Todd
My Writing Life
www.learnedaboutwriting.blogspot.com