As the margins on books in general are pared down by the likes of Amazon and Tesco on even the biggest of sellers like Ms Rowling so the big houses get more and more nervous about taking a chance on publishing any titles not written by a 'celeb'.
Thus we will no doubt see a huge rise in specialist and author-based presses, many of whom will understandable be taking the eBooks route through basic ecomomics.
FaceBook and the like do make it easier to publicise titles for either eBooks or PODs – and I know it makes sense.Yet I feel it would be a shame to go forward into a world where ebooks will have taken over to the exclusion of the traditional paper book.
Yes I see the fiscal advantage, and even the ecological ones. I cannot help feeling, that it will see the inevitable cut in longevity of many stories. They will vanish without trace as the small publishers come and go and so the eOriginals of various publications cease to be.
We can still buy a book printed 50 years ago - but will that be said of eBooks? I doubt it, at least so far as Specialist Press titles are concerned. Does that matter? we may ask. The past is past and we should be looking to new stories. And to some extent maybe that is true.It would be a shame for so much good fiction to just evaporate into the cosmos. In theory digital storage will last for ever. Yet microfiche was once cutting edge – and now increasingly irrelevant and fast vanishing from libraries. Though the race is on to translate much of it into digital you have to wonder how much will be lost forever because it was forgotten or dismissed as unimportant by then conservator.
Yes eBooks are coming, no matter now much we bemoan the fate of printed tomes. I, like many people, hate reading large amounts on screens, and the eReaders I have seen thus far do not allay my fears on that score. Given this small but important factor it may take a while – at least until technology has come up with a screen that dioes not give us all raging eye strain. But they will come as society becomes increasingly technology-dependent and shrinking world resources make paper-based publications en masse fiscally impossible.
Could this see a rise in the Ultra-Special editions of slip-cased, signed and limited editions?
Do we see the possibility of a return to a time when books become a true status symbol - valued and protected as the Art-form that it trult is?
For future generations of fantasy readers to be denied the excitement of browsing a second hand book stall and uncovering a first publication of some gem by this author or that would be a tragedy.
Only time will tell how these particular dice will fall
