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 grow

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.