7 ms·

How the shift to ebooks will affect genre categories in fiction

77 points by cstross 15y ago

keltex 15y ago
I'm a big SciFi fan and love Charles's work. I'm sure he knows more about the industry than I do, but from my own personal experience I much prefer the discovery process of SciFi books with eBooks than with pBooks. In an ideal world, bookstores would have their shelves well stocked with a deep assortment of titles. Unfortunately, most bookstores carry a thin selection of good SciFi books. They have some of the latest books from well known authors, but rarely did they have some of their earlier titles. And worse yet if the book was part of a series, you would see the latest one or two books but never any of the previous ones. So for example, they might carry Stross' "Rule 34" but not his earlier (and great) "Halting State" and "Accelerando". So what's a SciFi fan to do? Track them down in a used bookstore. I only get to visit Powell's once a year when I visit my parents. Back order them? Now with my Kindle, it's much easier. Grab a sample for free. Peruse a couple of chapters and if I like it, buy it and have it in my hands in a minute. DRM or no, it's a much more pleasant experience and I get to read a lot of better books.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Nobody is arguing that it's getting any harder to "find more books by the well-known author X" or "find more books in series Y". These techniques are powerful and getting more powerful. But how do you find new authors? Stross argues that the old technique, "look for whatever is shelved next to your favorite authors", is going to give much different results in the future than it did in the past, because in a world without physical shelves every author will scheme to get her works listed next to the works of as many other authors as possible. So what's next? One technique is "listen to what folks like Stross and Gaiman and Walton blog or Tweet about", but the point is that the set of works which I'll find with that technique is highly unlikely to correspond to a well-defined 20th-century genre like "SF" or "fantasy" or "mystery". It's unlikely to be an especially coherent set at all. It's going to be a highly personal subset of the entire canon of English literature.
  - cstross 15y ago
    It's worse than you think. I don't read enough. That's because when I'm writing SF as a day job, I have a limited capacity to enjoy reading the stuff recreationally in my spare time. (I know for a fact that this problem affects many other authors: you don't do for relaxation what you're doing for a day job the whole time.) So I'm not necessarily going to be a very good guide to what's worth reading ...
    - jlgreco 15y ago
      I think an important thing to consider in this discussion is the role of anthologies of short stories. I suspect because of the economics of paperback length that you mentioned, that seems to be how almost all short stories are published in physical form. The move to ebooks allows short stories to be published on their own which is great and all, but it likely comes at the cost of disincentivizing all of those multi-author variety packs. A good deal of my author discovery has come from those books (for example, I read your 'Lobsters' in one); it would be a shame to see their obsolescence.
      - pavel_lishin 15y ago
        I imagine that blogs acting as curators would pop up, recommending sets of short stories to purchase together. Odds are that they wouldn't cost any more than a collection does now.
  - bcl 15y ago
    The bookstore method of finding new authors was much worse than it is with ebooks. Your choices were limited by what the store selected to place on their shelves, a process that is more likely to result in what is popular instead of what is interesting to you. I like the ebook process of selection much better. I hear about books and authors from friends, blogs and discussions like this. I then go to Amazon, read the reviews, look at the kindle price (I don't pay more than $10 unless I am already familiar with the author) and click on the Buy Now button. ebooks may blur the lines between the genres, but is this really a bad thing? Is there any reason why a book can't fit into several categories? There isn't. Genre was a way for stores to organize their inventory, and now that shelf space is no longer a premium we can use better methods to find new reading material. Actually, since buying my Kindle I have read more than ever and find it hard to keep up with my reading list.
b0rsuk 15y ago
I don't buy it. Tags can work, tags can be very helpful, but they're time and effort consuming to get right. Personally, I hate with passion systems where I can't search by multiple tags (tag1 + tag2, or tag1 - tag2). Frequently, it degenerates into a situation where a single tag is assigned to zillions of content and you have to review it all manually anyway. And if you leave tag creation completely open, you'll and up with tags "dragon", "dragons", "one dragon", "two dragons", "half a dragon","dragoon", "fire breathing lizard", used inconsistently of course. I also don't buy the idea that everyone is going to use a tagging system. Not everyone understands the benefits or cares about them. Never underestimate inertia.
PaulHoule 15y ago
Note the theme of how collapsing publishing sectors get eaten by Hollywood. Consider the case of comics, particularly Marvel and DC. I'm a huge fan of Stan Lee's work from the 1960's and 1970's and I like some Marvel and DC stuff after that. Lee created some incredibly popular characters in the "Silver Age" but nothing added later really caught on. But, 40 years on, what can you write about the Incredible Hulk? How many times can Magneto trash the X-Men's house? Sure, later on the comic houses published some books by Frank Miller and others that had more literary and artistic pretention, but none of those sold as well. By 2000 or so both Marvel and DC flirted with bankruptcy and got bought by media conglomerates because movies about comic book characters were much more profitable than comic books.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  All true, but weren't comic book sales in decline before DC and Marvel were bought by Warner Bros and Disney? I don't think it's all bad. The indie sector is still very vibrant, and the good artists there usually get jobs in the majors and do good work (Remender, Abnett and Landing, etc).
- egypturnash 15y ago
  Lee AND THE ARTISTS. Many of these characters were developed in close collaboration; the "Marvel Method" was usually "writer and artist jam on ideas for a few hours, artist goes off and draws pages with rough notes as to dialogue, writer does final text based on that". Marvel would not exist today without the titanic creativity of Kirby. And then Marvel systematically screwed the artists out of credit, residuals, and just in general. They're still doing this, too. DC's not much better, either. Pardon the slight rantiness here. I'm an artist so the creative credit going to the party who does the LEAST amount of the creative work bugs me.
  - PaulHoule 15y ago
    Granted, but once Lee left the editor-in-chief position, things went downhill fast at Marvel and the best people (Marv Wolfman) wound up at DC.
russnewcomer 15y ago
I feel that Mr. Stross has sidestepped the strongly related medium that has been likewise disrupted by digital mediums and delivery - the music industry. It seems to me, as a not frequent observer of the music industry, that genres in music are doing just fine if not better than they were ten to twenty years ago. Now, we've got the iTunes Store, iPods, individual song purchase and the 'death of the album' and while there is genre blurring, it seems to me that this has also been happening for a long time and there are plenty of strong musicians who play almost exclusively in their genres and succeed. The music industry is not an exact analog to the publishing industry, I know, but it would seem they have enough similarities to be explored by someone like Mr. Stross, and extrapolated out to genre fiction.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is far older than recorded music itself. Concert venues enforce genre, more strongly than the shelving of books or records has ever done. If you show up at the square dance and they're playing eighteenth-century pavanes, or Black Flag, there will be protest. If you show up at the county fair and they've booked a Korean classical ensemble, there will be mass confusion. If you go clubbing and find that they're playing the classic hits of Kansas, there will be blood. Musical genres are centuries old, and because new music must necessarily be premiered at venues designed for old music, new musical forms have often been greeted with confusion or hostility. Audiences rioted at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiere, they were puzzled by most of Beethoven's symphonies, and you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the early days of punk and New Wave. For all I know, recent changes in the recorded-music industry could actually strengthen genre boundaries in music, because as recordings get less and less profitable the revenues from live performance become more and more important, and having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is far older than recorded music itself. Much of music is also intimately tied to the old art form of dancing and many other aspects of culture, such that very strong sets of expectations are placed on music in different contexts. Actually, it's even more complicated than that. These sets of expectations are often somewhat disconnected from the mainstream population's everyday experience, have become somewhat shallow/cartoony, and are subject to media manipulation. you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the early days of punk and New Wave...having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band. Having a live band is often fraught with dealing with expectations. It's to the point where someone can have something like an Irish Traditional or Bluegrass influenced band and run up against people constantly asking for music that you don't really want to do or really doesn't fit the aesthetic of your band.
Havoc 15y ago
I don't feel that the marketing or curation is problematic really. However: Suppose I want to buy "A Song of Ice and Fire" for my Kindl - a reasonable enough proposition in my view. A quick check reveals two problems: Firstly those bits & bytes are somehow more expensive than the massmarket paperback - which is completely ridiculous. Secondly both the individual books and the set have warnings (either by amazon or reviewers) that clearly state that its a criminally bad OCR job. So essentially the product is overpriced and defective. Doesn't matter under what genre you file that its a crap purchase. Same thing for the Dune series. So in the mean time I think I'll just side-load books until Amazon sorts their shit out. Hell I'd even look past the overpriced bit if they fix the crap OCR jobs.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  Both of those issues are the fault of the publisher, not Amazon. The publishers are being dragged kicking and screaming (and whining) into the ebook future, and they're not doing a very good job of serving their customers as a result.
  - Havoc 14y ago
    You're right, perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned Amazon as the culprit. Nonetheless I feel Amazon is partly to blame since they clearly have the muscle to force the publishers to fix their mess. Besides, how difficult can it be? Find a competent English major, fuel him/her with some red bull, pizza and bit of cash and they'll fix it. Hell, if they had a mechanism to do so the fans of these books (Dune etc) would probably fix it for free.
- nnnnni 15y ago
  What I don't get is WHY a modern book would require OCR to be turned into a digital format. The publisher surely has the original tex (or whatever format the author/editor used) file(s) that can easily be rendered to epub/mobi, right?! If a book predates computers, I can understand OCR, but not for something that's been written in the past ~20 years and is popular enough to not be "lost".
tomku 15y ago
Two main points: 1) Exclusive genre is artificial and arbitrary, an incidental relic of the physical book-selling process. It would die whether e-books became popular or not, because people were already shifting their physical book purchasing to the "infinite bookshelves" of Amazon and B&N. E-books are simply the "native format" for the infinite bookshelf. If you can imagine a world where Kindle-compatible e-books were sold offline in brick-and-mortar stores via throwaway SD cards or scannable high-res 2D barcodes, they would end up divided by exclusive genres as well. The pigeonholing of a book into a single genre is a characteristic of the medium of sale, not the actual end format of the book. 2) While we're losing the "nearby book on the shelf" effect, we're replacing it with a vibrant ecosystem of social networks, blogs and forums external to the actual book sale location. When I shop for books, I don't really do it on Amazon - I go there when I know what I want, but I rely on sites like GoodReads[1], Any New Books [2], Twitter (where I follow authors I'm interested in) and Facebook (where I sometimes find recommendations from friends and family) to find my next read. This is definitely a shift, but I find it to be an overwhelming improvement from the old system of going to the bookstore and checking out whatever book's spine catches my eye. It's less arbitrary, it's (hopefully) less subject to manipulation by authors and publishers, and I've enjoyed reading the books chosen this way more. Your mileage may vary, naturally. I think that to a certain extent this is similar to the "filter bubble" mentioned in the context of Google and searching. Having the "infinite bookshelf" and the powerful filtering/tagging makes it easier to find what you want, but it eliminates the natural wandering that some people rely on to be introduced to new things that they wouldn't necessarily look for intentionally. It may be that we simply have to force ourselves to wander a bit if we want variety and novelty, and hopefully the digital world continues to make that easy as well. [1]: http://www.goodreads.com/ http://www.goodreads.com/ [2]: http://anynewbooks.com/ http://anynewbooks.com/
nextparadigms 15y ago
Fiction should cost $0.99, because it's a genre millions of people buy. At $0.99 the price will represent no barrier for anyone even mildly interested in reading a fiction book.
zupreme 15y ago
I'm an eBook author with several books that pretty much live on the first page of results for their genres, so I have experience in this arena. The recent growth in the eBook market is, in my opinion, excellent for most aspiring authors, but might be bad for some already successful authors. eBooks lower the barrier to market entry. Aspiring authors don't need expensive equipment or software anymore (my ebooks are written in Microsoft Word), nor do they need to spend time socializing and mingling with industry types that they should be spending on writing. However, eBooks are hastening the end of the days of an author being able to write one book and live off of it for years. The lowering of costs, as well as the increase in competition, will force eBook authors, myself included, to focus on both increasing quality and on churning out more books more quickly. The economy of scale applies here in ways that used to only apply to publishers, not authors. Of course, this makes sense because in the eBook era the author is, quite often, the publisher.
javajosh 15y ago
I think ebooks will change the landscape less in the short term than Charles is supposing. The idea of 'genre' is a powerful one with a lot of momentum, and not a little utility independent of physical organization of books. Genre will continue to be a useful way for retailers to partition the power law to maximize sales. I'm also hopeful that the growth of ebooks will make the promise of GoodReads or even the good old days of rec.arts.sf.written come true: that 'what you read' will become an ever more viable way to find birds of a feather for both book recommendations and social connections. One interesting thing is that an e-ink e-book is particularly bad interface with which to find new titles. It's fine for buying something you know you want. But a real, internet connected PC is currently needed. I imagine this situation will get better.

77 points by cstross 15y ago

I'm a big SciFi fan and love Charles's work. I'm sure he knows more about the industry than I do, but from my own personal experience I much prefer the discovery process of SciFi books with eBooks than with pBooks. In an ideal world, bookstores would have their shelves well stocked with a deep assortment of titles. Unfortunately, most bookstores carry a thin selection of good SciFi books. They have some of the latest books from well known authors, but rarely did they have some of their earlier titles. And worse yet if the book was part of a series, you would see the latest one or two books but never any of the previous ones. So for example, they might carry Stross' "Rule 34" but not his earlier (and great) "Halting State" and "Accelerando". So what's a SciFi fan to do? Track them down in a used bookstore. I only get to visit Powell's once a year when I visit my parents. Back order them? Now with my Kindle, it's much easier. Grab a sample for free. Peruse a couple of chapters and if I like it, buy it and have it in my hands in a minute. DRM or no, it's a much more pleasant experience and I get to read a lot of better books.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Nobody is arguing that it's getting any harder to "find more books by the well-known author X" or "find more books in series Y". These techniques are powerful and getting more powerful. But how do you find new authors? Stross argues that the old technique, "look for whatever is shelved next to your favorite authors", is going to give much different results in the future than it did in the past, because in a world without physical shelves every author will scheme to get her works listed next to the works of as many other authors as possible. So what's next? One technique is "listen to what folks like Stross and Gaiman and Walton blog or Tweet about", but the point is that the set of works which I'll find with that technique is highly unlikely to correspond to a well-defined 20th-century genre like "SF" or "fantasy" or "mystery". It's unlikely to be an especially coherent set at all. It's going to be a highly personal subset of the entire canon of English literature.
- cstross 15y ago
  It's worse than you think. I don't read enough. That's because when I'm writing SF as a day job, I have a limited capacity to enjoy reading the stuff recreationally in my spare time. (I know for a fact that this problem affects many other authors: you don't do for relaxation what you're doing for a day job the whole time.) So I'm not necessarily going to be a very good guide to what's worth reading ...
  - jlgreco 15y ago
    I think an important thing to consider in this discussion is the role of anthologies of short stories. I suspect because of the economics of paperback length that you mentioned, that seems to be how almost all short stories are published in physical form. The move to ebooks allows short stories to be published on their own which is great and all, but it likely comes at the cost of disincentivizing all of those multi-author variety packs. A good deal of my author discovery has come from those books (for example, I read your 'Lobsters' in one); it would be a shame to see their obsolescence.
    - pavel_lishin 15y ago
      I imagine that blogs acting as curators would pop up, recommending sets of short stories to purchase together. Odds are that they wouldn't cost any more than a collection does now.
- bcl 15y ago
  The bookstore method of finding new authors was much worse than it is with ebooks. Your choices were limited by what the store selected to place on their shelves, a process that is more likely to result in what is popular instead of what is interesting to you. I like the ebook process of selection much better. I hear about books and authors from friends, blogs and discussions like this. I then go to Amazon, read the reviews, look at the kindle price (I don't pay more than $10 unless I am already familiar with the author) and click on the Buy Now button. ebooks may blur the lines between the genres, but is this really a bad thing? Is there any reason why a book can't fit into several categories? There isn't. Genre was a way for stores to organize their inventory, and now that shelf space is no longer a premium we can use better methods to find new reading material. Actually, since buying my Kindle I have read more than ever and find it hard to keep up with my reading list.

b0rsuk 15y ago

I don't buy it. Tags can work, tags can be very helpful, but they're time and effort consuming to get right. Personally, I hate with passion systems where I can't search by multiple tags (tag1 + tag2, or tag1 - tag2). Frequently, it degenerates into a situation where a single tag is assigned to zillions of content and you have to review it all manually anyway. And if you leave tag creation completely open, you'll and up with tags "dragon", "dragons", "one dragon", "two dragons", "half a dragon","dragoon", "fire breathing lizard", used inconsistently of course. I also don't buy the idea that everyone is going to use a tagging system. Not everyone understands the benefits or cares about them. Never underestimate inertia.

PaulHoule 15y ago

Note the theme of how collapsing publishing sectors get eaten by Hollywood. Consider the case of comics, particularly Marvel and DC. I'm a huge fan of Stan Lee's work from the 1960's and 1970's and I like some Marvel and DC stuff after that. Lee created some incredibly popular characters in the "Silver Age" but nothing added later really caught on. But, 40 years on, what can you write about the Incredible Hulk? How many times can Magneto trash the X-Men's house? Sure, later on the comic houses published some books by Frank Miller and others that had more literary and artistic pretention, but none of those sold as well. By 2000 or so both Marvel and DC flirted with bankruptcy and got bought by media conglomerates because movies about comic book characters were much more profitable than comic books.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
All true, but weren't comic book sales in decline before DC and Marvel were bought by Warner Bros and Disney? I don't think it's all bad. The indie sector is still very vibrant, and the good artists there usually get jobs in the majors and do good work (Remender, Abnett and Landing, etc).
egypturnash 15y ago
Lee AND THE ARTISTS. Many of these characters were developed in close collaboration; the "Marvel Method" was usually "writer and artist jam on ideas for a few hours, artist goes off and draws pages with rough notes as to dialogue, writer does final text based on that". Marvel would not exist today without the titanic creativity of Kirby. And then Marvel systematically screwed the artists out of credit, residuals, and just in general. They're still doing this, too. DC's not much better, either. Pardon the slight rantiness here. I'm an artist so the creative credit going to the party who does the LEAST amount of the creative work bugs me.
- PaulHoule 15y ago
  Granted, but once Lee left the editor-in-chief position, things went downhill fast at Marvel and the best people (Marv Wolfman) wound up at DC.

russnewcomer 15y ago

I feel that Mr. Stross has sidestepped the strongly related medium that has been likewise disrupted by digital mediums and delivery - the music industry. It seems to me, as a not frequent observer of the music industry, that genres in music are doing just fine if not better than they were ten to twenty years ago. Now, we've got the iTunes Store, iPods, individual song purchase and the 'death of the album' and while there is genre blurring, it seems to me that this has also been happening for a long time and there are plenty of strong musicians who play almost exclusively in their genres and succeed. The music industry is not an exact analog to the publishing industry, I know, but it would seem they have enough similarities to be explored by someone like Mr. Stross, and extrapolated out to genre fiction.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is far older than recorded music itself. Concert venues enforce genre, more strongly than the shelving of books or records has ever done. If you show up at the square dance and they're playing eighteenth-century pavanes, or Black Flag, there will be protest. If you show up at the county fair and they've booked a Korean classical ensemble, there will be mass confusion. If you go clubbing and find that they're playing the classic hits of Kansas, there will be blood. Musical genres are centuries old, and because new music must necessarily be premiered at venues designed for old music, new musical forms have often been greeted with confusion or hostility. Audiences rioted at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiere, they were puzzled by most of Beethoven's symphonies, and you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the early days of punk and New Wave. For all I know, recent changes in the recorded-music industry could actually strengthen genre boundaries in music, because as recordings get less and less profitable the revenues from live performance become more and more important, and having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is far older than recorded music itself. Much of music is also intimately tied to the old art form of dancing and many other aspects of culture, such that very strong sets of expectations are placed on music in different contexts. Actually, it's even more complicated than that. These sets of expectations are often somewhat disconnected from the mainstream population's everyday experience, have become somewhat shallow/cartoony, and are subject to media manipulation. you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the early days of punk and New Wave...having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band. Having a live band is often fraught with dealing with expectations. It's to the point where someone can have something like an Irish Traditional or Bluegrass influenced band and run up against people constantly asking for music that you don't really want to do or really doesn't fit the aesthetic of your band.

Havoc 15y ago

I don't feel that the marketing or curation is problematic really. However: Suppose I want to buy "A Song of Ice and Fire" for my Kindl - a reasonable enough proposition in my view. A quick check reveals two problems: Firstly those bits & bytes are somehow more expensive than the massmarket paperback - which is completely ridiculous. Secondly both the individual books and the set have warnings (either by amazon or reviewers) that clearly state that its a criminally bad OCR job. So essentially the product is overpriced and defective. Doesn't matter under what genre you file that its a crap purchase. Same thing for the Dune series. So in the mean time I think I'll just side-load books until Amazon sorts their shit out. Hell I'd even look past the overpriced bit if they fix the crap OCR jobs.

waterlesscloud 15y ago
Both of those issues are the fault of the publisher, not Amazon. The publishers are being dragged kicking and screaming (and whining) into the ebook future, and they're not doing a very good job of serving their customers as a result.
- Havoc 14y ago
  You're right, perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned Amazon as the culprit. Nonetheless I feel Amazon is partly to blame since they clearly have the muscle to force the publishers to fix their mess. Besides, how difficult can it be? Find a competent English major, fuel him/her with some red bull, pizza and bit of cash and they'll fix it. Hell, if they had a mechanism to do so the fans of these books (Dune etc) would probably fix it for free.
nnnnni 15y ago
What I don't get is WHY a modern book would require OCR to be turned into a digital format. The publisher surely has the original tex (or whatever format the author/editor used) file(s) that can easily be rendered to epub/mobi, right?! If a book predates computers, I can understand OCR, but not for something that's been written in the past ~20 years and is popular enough to not be "lost".

tomku 15y ago

Two main points: 1) Exclusive genre is artificial and arbitrary, an incidental relic of the physical book-selling process. It would die whether e-books became popular or not, because people were already shifting their physical book purchasing to the "infinite bookshelves" of Amazon and B&N. E-books are simply the "native format" for the infinite bookshelf. If you can imagine a world where Kindle-compatible e-books were sold offline in brick-and-mortar stores via throwaway SD cards or scannable high-res 2D barcodes, they would end up divided by exclusive genres as well. The pigeonholing of a book into a single genre is a characteristic of the medium of sale, not the actual end format of the book. 2) While we're losing the "nearby book on the shelf" effect, we're replacing it with a vibrant ecosystem of social networks, blogs and forums external to the actual book sale location. When I shop for books, I don't really do it on Amazon - I go there when I know what I want, but I rely on sites like GoodReads[1], Any New Books [2], Twitter (where I follow authors I'm interested in) and Facebook (where I sometimes find recommendations from friends and family) to find my next read. This is definitely a shift, but I find it to be an overwhelming improvement from the old system of going to the bookstore and checking out whatever book's spine catches my eye. It's less arbitrary, it's (hopefully) less subject to manipulation by authors and publishers, and I've enjoyed reading the books chosen this way more. Your mileage may vary, naturally. I think that to a certain extent this is similar to the "filter bubble" mentioned in the context of Google and searching. Having the "infinite bookshelf" and the powerful filtering/tagging makes it easier to find what you want, but it eliminates the natural wandering that some people rely on to be introduced to new things that they wouldn't necessarily look for intentionally. It may be that we simply have to force ourselves to wander a bit if we want variety and novelty, and hopefully the digital world continues to make that easy as well. [1]: http://www.goodreads.com/ http://www.goodreads.com/ [2]: http://anynewbooks.com/ http://anynewbooks.com/

nextparadigms 15y ago

Fiction should cost $0.99, because it's a genre millions of people buy. At $0.99 the price will represent no barrier for anyone even mildly interested in reading a fiction book.

zupreme 15y ago

I'm an eBook author with several books that pretty much live on the first page of results for their genres, so I have experience in this arena. The recent growth in the eBook market is, in my opinion, excellent for most aspiring authors, but might be bad for some already successful authors. eBooks lower the barrier to market entry. Aspiring authors don't need expensive equipment or software anymore (my ebooks are written in Microsoft Word), nor do they need to spend time socializing and mingling with industry types that they should be spending on writing. However, eBooks are hastening the end of the days of an author being able to write one book and live off of it for years. The lowering of costs, as well as the increase in competition, will force eBook authors, myself included, to focus on both increasing quality and on churning out more books more quickly. The economy of scale applies here in ways that used to only apply to publishers, not authors. Of course, this makes sense because in the eBook era the author is, quite often, the publisher.

javajosh 15y ago

I think ebooks will change the landscape less in the short term than Charles is supposing. The idea of 'genre' is a powerful one with a lot of momentum, and not a little utility independent of physical organization of books. Genre will continue to be a useful way for retailers to partition the power law to maximize sales. I'm also hopeful that the growth of ebooks will make the promise of GoodReads or even the good old days of rec.arts.sf.written come true: that 'what you read' will become an ever more viable way to find birds of a feather for both book recommendations and social connections. One interesting thing is that an e-ink e-book is particularly bad interface with which to find new titles. It's fine for buying something you know you want. But a real, internet connected PC is currently needed. I imagine this situation will get better.