I received the following letter in my inbox from L. awhile ago, lost it, found it, and can’t believe I didn’t post it earlier. This rules.
Dear anyone who wants to read this:
Thank you for making digital books available. As a voracious reader with insomniac tendencies, THANK YOU.
Nora Roberts: I would probably have never bought a single book if they weren’t available in digital format. I’m not a “romance reader.” BUT. Your J. D. Robb books aren’t straight up contemporary romance. And I keep seeing their titles bandied about here, there, and yonder. So a couple of months ago, jonesing for a good read, I thought, “I’ll give Ms. Roberts a try.” And it was simple. My impulsive 1 am decision did not require me to go to a bookstore with two kids under age six in tow.
I’m on book seven.
Ilona Andrews: Holy crap. I LOVE your Kate Daniels books. I’ve found them via “readers who bought THIS also bought THIS” on Amazon. Because I got a Kindle for my birthday last September. And while Amazon is the devil, they are also a hell of a marketing team and I can buy books at 2:00am and start reading at 2:01. Digital or print, I WILL be buying the next one in May.
Courtney Milan: Never would have read a word if I were still a brick and mortar exclusive shopper. I saw your name at PubRants and here and thought, “Hey, that’s some pretty good street cred. I’d like to read something new. What the heck?” I loved Proof by Seduction. Again, I don’t consider myself a straight up romance reader. There is a probablility of -.003 I would have bought this book browsing in a brick and mortar store.
Gail Carriger: Bought Soulless on a whim, facing a cross country flight armed only with my Kindle. I claim personal responsibility for no less than five more (digital) copies being consumed and adored by readers I know.
The titles/authors cited here are a sampling of the orgy of book buying I have engaged in since I got my Kindle 6 months ago. There is NO BARRIER between me and the impulse buy. The only books I have to think about require a trip to a bookstore or shipping. I was already researching online before one of the very treasured visits to a physical bookstore. What if. What IF. What if I never get to a bookstore again in my whole life? That won’t happen because I love bookstores. But in the last six months, I’ve bought fifty books. This vastly outstrips my previous buying habits, which were limited by my ability to get to a bookseller and browse.
The sky is not falling by raining digital books. We want them, we love them, we’re ready for them. There will be more of us. eReaders will get cheaper and more of us will have them. Please, publishing houses, Amazon, B&N, Apple, and whoever else. Please. Just figure it out. We’ll pay for the books. Just make them available. And after that, make them quality.
Thank you,
Random Middle America Book Girl (Read: your target market.)
Hi all. Geo restrictions had bitten me too, until I found a workaround that doesn’t involve the darknet. I have two accounts, one which has a US address attached to it. Then send gift certificates from your home account to the US one. Voilà, legally bought ebooks, no geo restrictions. Hat tip to the brilliant minds that inhabit MobileRead.com.
That said, the publishers really, really need to get their stuff in a pile, or the darknet is going to kill them.
I wish the pubs would pull their heads out of their asses and leave the pricing alone on ebooks. I HAD a great time filling my nook before all that crap went down, now I’ve slowed down on buying ebooks. BN was killing my book budget with the one click buy. Since all that went down, I buy the majority of my ebooks from smaller stores like ARe, ebooks, BoB, Diesel and others. I use to buy a lot from FW, but they’ve had problems for a while. The library is a great source for my non-keepers.
I’ll never get rid of my paper keepers though.
Need more ebook backlists at a decent price point. I’ll buy used paper if not, as always on BL.
I am slowly catching up (and still looking to get that e-reader) but I do love how easily I can download a PDF to my laptop in under 60 seconds. Now carrying that laptop around just to read is another story…
Joanna Aislinn
NO MATTER WHY
The Wild Rose Press
http://www.joannaaislinn.com
http://www.joannaasilinn.wordpress.com
@Laurelwreath Someone on DorothyL just alerted me to the fact that a boatload of Georgette Heyers are now available on Kindle, price range $6-8. That is exactly the sort of thing I’m hoping to see happen with these older but still under copyright books, though my genre is generally more mystery than romance. Can’t wait to see Nero Wolfe and Archie, Emma Lathen, even Perry Mason.
As for paper versus Kindle, I’m with @Becky. I can’t tell you how many of my favorites I have had to repurchase because they wore out, I loaned them to a friend who disappeared or, the worst, I had to give them to the Friends of the Library when I moved from a big house with a 2-car garage to a 1-BR condo w/carport. I see the electronic storage as more lasting than the paper. Now, I still probably read 40 library books to 1 Kindle purchase, and I am lucky to live where the library is well funded and not in danger of closing/losing personnel/cutting back hours. But if that were not the case, I’d be slowly adding my standards to my Kindle and resorting to the heckuva lot of free classics when the budget was blown.
As for geographic restrictions, I get that it’s frustrating, but I think it’s only a matter of time for the rights contracts to be modified to reflect today’s reality; in the meantime, I think anyone who really wants to can figure out a workaround.
I’ve enabled several new Gail Carriger fans by buying print copies of Soulless as gifts—not just the recipients, but also the bookstore cashiers. They’re fascinated by the book, every. single. time. : )
Taking notes on books for my reading list and also on work-arounds for GR – I too have problems with that as I live in Egypt – and it doesn’t seem to matter that I have a longstanding Amazon account with a US billing address. I was having fun with my Kindle PC app until they tightened up on their IP blocking. My own books aren’t even available to me!
As for ebook pricing – that is a huge reason I have requested the rights back on my backlist and am in the process of making them available on Smashwords.com. I can upload them myself and price them low and they are available in multiple formats and DRM free. They’ll also be distributed in the larger stores soon, including Kindle, Apple, Sony, etc. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Maggie: I did that, but now they check IP addresses too and since mine isn’t in the US, they forbid me from buying.
If anyone has a futher workaround for that problem, I’d love to hear it, either in thread or by email. While I don’t approve of piracy, I have to admit to having few qualms about working around the geo restrictions as I’m still making sure everyone gets their money. However, I’m willing to be educated if there’s a good reason why I shouldn’t feel that way.
I think that’s an email we can all identify with. After i bought my first ereader, i just had to go on a book budget. As much as i make lists before i go to my local bookstore, am a total impulse buyer. So now i make a list only for books that are either not digital available or am in no hurry to read. The ones available in ebook, with the nice cover and interesting blurb? Totally gets first dibs on my book budget .
Publishers need to start listening to the ebook buyers, because if the price is right and available digitally? We will buy it even if we have no idea who the author is.
OK, maybe it is heresy for a librarian to say this but I love ebooks! And those sneaky publishers who give me the first book in a series free have successfully hooked me on many a new author. I’d never bought an erotic book before I got one free on Amazon for my Kindle but I’ve branched out to read other authors in that field. I’ll admit I’m shy about buying those in print and probably wouldn’t have discovered some of these authors without that incentive.
And it isn’t so much 1am when the urge to buy hits me as it is those dull Sunday afternoons when the guys are busy yelling at the TV and some sports team, I can’t face yet another chore around the house and I’ve run out of books I want to read. Many a dollar has flown out of my wallet into the clutches of Amazon (curse them!) around then.
@Bonnie
HOORAY! Thanks for notifying me of this. People have been recommending Heyer to me for two years, but every time I’d see that Sourcebooks had them for 9.99+ on Amazon I thought “you’ve got to be kidding.” So I guess I’m the person the publishers were thinking about when they said they didn’t want us to become accustomed to specific price points. Because I’m solidly in the camp of not paying more than 6.39 for a mass market regency; my trade contemporary budget peaks around $8. And now I’m off to impulse buy Regency Buck.
I’m still too leery of file corruption and upgraded hardware that can no longer read older files to be comfortable with the idea of moving to ebooks. If I did get an ebook reader (which is a big if, until the price of readers drops considerably – $100 is, in my opinion, far too much to pay for just a device to read the books, especially when the ebooks themselves may still cost as much as the print versions, which can be read without that expensive device), I know that what I’d probably be spending most of my money on, at least at the beginning, is stuff that is either only released in ebook form or costs far less in ebook form.
But then again, I live near 2 used bookstores I use fairly regularly, one chain bookstore, I don’t mind using the Internet to buy any print books I can’t get from those three sources, and I work in a library that has an ILL department. So it’s not like I’m hurting for sources of print books.
I just found a lot of Heyer’s collection at B&N for about the same price range as Amazon. I have trouble paying $8 or more for a e-book. After all the publishers and book sellers have almost no overhead for durable good. They don’t have to have paper, or ink or presses or distributions systems that include trucks ect. They do need good electronic servers and payment processors. But since I’m sure they don’t pass the profits along to the authors, (I’m cynical it’s all those years in business), I don’t see why we couldn’t benefit from lower prices. Yeah right 😛
I think different sites deal with geographic restrictions in different ways. Two work arounds that I employ are:
Subscribe to Borderlinx (free) who will provide you with a US address. Using this I have been able to buy what I want at BooksonBoard, paying with PayPal (some sites won’t accept credit cards from outside the US).
A kind lady on the mobilereads site is willing to buy Sony gift certificates. Periodically I ask her to purchase me $30-$40 worth and I pay her through Paypal.
I still haven’t managed to crack Amazon – I think they check IP addresses.
Which sites allow you to purchase gift certificates from outside the US?
I would warn you that overcoming geographic restrictions can be expensive! I managed to purchase all the July publications I wanted including Bonds of Justice, Lady’s Isabella’s Scandalous Marriage (I never did managet to purchase the previous book) and I purchased His at Night as well.
Borderlinx link (I have been subscribed to this shipping company for several months, and haven’t found any problems with it)
https://www.borderlinx.com/m/pages/eu/how-it-works
PS If I become destitute, it will be solely down to my inability to resist the instant gratification that comes from downloading the ebooks I see recommended by the reviewers I respect!
@RachelT I’ve got the gift certificate thing working at Fictionwise, BooksonBoard, Diesel, AllRomance and ebooks.com. Haven’t really tried the big chains, ‘cause I can get _most_ of what I want at the smaller stores. The agency pricing thing certainly does bite, though. Even if I can get around the geo restrictions, I’m not paying more than $10 for what is essentially paperback fiction. I mean, hello – who’s going to pay almost $15 for the last of Mary Balogh’s Huxtable series, when you’re only ‘renting’ the book? And in another category, what about the new Anne/Todd McCaffrey at almost $30? Get serious here!!
@Carly
RB is fun, as almost all of them are. My personal faves (for various reasons) are
Cotillion (Friday’s Child has a similar plot)
The Grand Sophy
Frederica
These Old Shades and its sequel Devil’s Cub (further sequel but can be read as standalone Infamous Army).
Happy Regency reading!
I must admit I’m a bit afraid of these ebook reader things. A favorite genre of mine is dystopic literature and I’m afraid it’s made me wary (read paranoid) about not having a hard print copy of well anything. I’m too afraid of censorship happening (again yes paranoid). I’m also a very tactile person and I can’t shake the feeling that something just isn’t right when I’m reading an ebook (which is odd to say because I read a lot of electronic literature). I also may have a slight tendency to break every electronic piece of equipment I ever touch… seriously. I have a paper weight computer.
I adore Gail Carriger and have been waiting exceedingly impatiently for the third book to come out, becoming highly angry when I’m on LibraryThing and see that there are people out there who are not me that have it and I cannot buy it as yet. Highly angry.
I LOVE MY KINDLE!!!