The E-Publishing Trail with Dusty Rhodes

THE E-PUBLISHING TRAIL - September

E-BOOKS: THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE

By Staff Writer Dusty Rhodes

  It was late. It had been a long, hard day. There was nothing interesting on television. All she wanted to do was curl up with a good book and a cup of hot chocolate. But she had read every book in the house. Then she remembered the e-reader her friend from work had loaned her.

She logged onto her computer, quickly found an online e-bookstore, and was browsing through hundreds of titles. Spotting one she had seen earlier in the local bookstore for almost twenty dollars, she was pleasantly surprised to see that it was only five dollars as an e-book.

In minutes she had purchased the book, downloaded it into her friends e-reader, and was sipping chocolate and enjoying a good novel.

This scenario, or one very similar, is being played out thousands of times every day. Readers from all over the world are discovering the advantages of e-books. And there are many.

E-books are typically more cross-genre. That is to say they aren't bound by strict guidelines ordinarily required by the old line publishing houses. E-book authors regularly cross the lines of two or more genres making for more exciting reading.

E-books introduce the readers to new and up-coming authors. Thousands of young authors are producing outstanding works and developing followings among readers around the world.

E-books are more economical. Typically, an e-book will cost only a fraction of the cost of a hardcover book from your local bookstore.

Going on vacation or on a business trip? Most e-readers on the market today will hold up to twenty full length e-books.

Though still an infant industry, e-books already account for between 5-10% of total book sales in the U.S. In a recent poll by Publishers Weekly, 11% had already purchased or read an e-book and 78% of those stated they enjoyed the experience and were likely to buy more.

With internet users coming online at an astounding rate of over two million each month and the younger generation becoming proficient at using the computer at an ever-earlier age, is it any wonder most experts agree that e-books are the wave of the future?

To be sure, many of the earlier e-books thrust on the market left a lot to be desired, and left a bad taste in many reader's mouths that still linger today. But today's e-books bare little resemblance to the earlier product. Today's e-books are well-written, well-edited, and are every bit as good and often times better than books produced by the large New York publishers.

While the minimum necessary for downloading and reading an e-book is a computer, most readers choose to download their e-books into any one of several e-readers on the market today.

MobilePro 790 touchscreen handheld is MS Windows compatible. It runs MS Reader, Mobipocket Reader, and Palm Reader formats.

Palm PDA OS compatible e-reader runs Palm Reader and Mobipocket Reader formats.

South Korean made Hiebook is a dedicated e-reader and has good visibility.

Perhaps the newest and most promising of the current crop is the China-made EB 660 e-book Reader.

New technology will inevitably develop more reader-friendly and cheaper devices making them available to the masses.

E-readers will become standard fare in public libraries where one can load dozens of e-books into an e-reader and check it out just as you now do books.

School children will carry a single e-reader containing all of their textbooks. E-readers will become as common in the home as a television or camcorder.

To be sure, the e-book industry has a lot of reader-education to do. Untold millions have never heard of an e-book let alone read one. Millions more (especially the older generation) still prefer the paper book rather than reading from an electronic device. Only time, education, and advertising will likely change that, but change it surely will. Like it or not, e-books are here to stay. They are the wave of the future.

Happy Trails!

Dusty Rhodes is a best selling author of Western novels, and currently serves as the President of EPIC -- The Electronically Published Internet Connection "the Voice of Electronic Publishing" and sponsor of the EPPIE Awards. You can visit Dusty's homepage at www.eclectics.com/dustyrhodes

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