E-book Publishing

Print continues to serve both ends of the marketplace, but it's hard to see the wider digital market as a failure.

Perhaps you've noticed that ebooks are awful. I hate them, but I don't know why I hate them. Maybe it's snobbery. Perhaps, despite my long career in technology and media, I'm a secret Luddite. Maybe I can't stand the idea of looking at books as computers after a long day of looking at computers as computers. I don't know, except for knowing that ebooks are awful.

One of the biggest "first-world problems" to arise during 2020's necessary isolation in response to Covid-19 has to do with e-books. I'm specifically talking about e-galleys, the early versions of books that critics, reviewers, and librarians often receive from publishers in place of paper versions.

Ebook sales are dying. EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. are insanely popular.

If the short definition of cognitive dissonance is holding two contradictory ideas to be true, ebooks are about as dissonant as digital content gets.  Read more

In recent articles, I have pointed with optimism to the green-shoots of recovery for the book industry after a bruising and challenging seven years.