Yet More E-books for the iPhone/iPod Touch

Jed and the Titanium Turtle and Once a Hero both have made their debut in the App store. With Once a Hero coming out, I am the first living author to have a novel offered on the iPhone/Touch. 🙂

The comments I’ve had back from folks who have already purchased other stories have been roundly positive. They’re enjoying the interface. I heard from several folks at the Second Life reading of The Silver Knife. It went over well enough that I may reprise that reading elsewhere in SL; and probably will do another reading in SL in a couple weeks.

It’s funny to see the reaction to the ebooks from folks around the net. Michael Zapp and I have both been praised for getting a good reader out there, and panned for not having something where folks can load up books they bought for other platforms. One place even suggested we had either chutzpah or vision in getting our stuff ready. I think it’s a bit of both. It’s having the belief in what ebooks represent in terms of cost savings, direct benefit to the author (since I can charge less and make more by cutting out the middleman), space savings, ease of use and fun. Folks can’t enjoy stories if they’re not out there.

One point that a lot of folks raise is that since there is no one standard for ebooks, they can’t read their previously purchased books on a new device. I guess I have skewed perspective on this. I see each format as a foreign language. I’d love for a book I bought in Spanish to change to English at a whim, but it isn’t happening. Moreover, and this is true for the short term and possibly long term: as long as there are competing devices, there will be different formats. While a boycott of ebooks until such differences are worked out might seem to be a viable means to bring pressure on publishers, solidarity there will break the second a work is offered exclusively in a particular format.

As for the big publishers weighing in and setting standards, don’t hold your breath. Paper publishers have a number of reasons not to jump on all this. First, they have no R&D department to help figure out standards, and the chances of them agreeing amongst themselves is zero. Second, their infrastructure and business plan is built around warehousing, printing, transportation and accounting, not servers and bandwidth. Their understanding of technology is pitiful, to be quite frank. Third, they feel they were burned with Rocket E-books, and then again with the .dot com boom, where their websites didn’t sell stuff as fast as Amazon. They believe that because they control the dominant paradigm now, they’ll control it forever. They have no reason to hop on this and, if it does become a problem, they can turn around and buy the tech from someone later on. They’ll stand pat and let others figure this out.

As for the deal for authors, it breaks down pretty simply. Amazon and Mobipocket offer authors (or publishers) 35% of the cover price. This is the distributor discount they get when buying paper books. In our contracts, most authors get half of the money earned on an e-book. So, we’re picking up 17.5% of what Amazon or other ebook publishers charge. (And there is an open question as to whether or not any of those ebook publishers actually have the right to be publishing those editions.) If my last royalty statement is any indication, ebook sales amount to 2% of print sales, though those numbers only include a month or two of possible Kindle sales.