Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Digital printing liberates readers – and authors

We were wrong to fear the e-revolution – embracing the ebook was the right thing to do after all
Norman Mailer is among the literary greats featured in a new collection of interviews with authors. Photograph: Michael Brennan/Getty Images

For about 15 years, I have covered the ups and downs of literary London in these pages, a mixture of reviews, columns, interviews and commentary. It was, in hindsight, a snapshot of an extraordinary moment in the world of books. One of the questions that vexed us most in the years immediately before and after the millennium was the "paradigm shift" of the e-revolution. Lost in a fog of change, we asked: what does it mean? What is the future of the book?
Today's answer is that ebooks are a wonderful new way of publishing quickly and cheaply, of responding to an opportunity, on behalf of readers, worldwide. Digitised reading has become a global liberation: long or short, ebooks can satisfy the hungry reader's palate at very low cost, and at the click of a mouse. Plus, their influence is benign. Ebooks, we now see, do not mean the death of the book. Actually, the reverse is true. Hardbacks have been invigorated by ebook publishing.
I feel this all the more acutely because, for the first time in my literary career, I have just published not one, but three ebooks (priced £2.99 each) Each is about 30,000 words long, or 100 pages of conventional text, and each is compiled from my Observer journalism. There's an ebook called On Reading: Notes on the Literary Landscape, 1995-2012. A companion volume, On Writing, and finally On Authors, a collection of interviews with some contemporary greats (including Seamus Heaney, Norman Mailer and VS Naipaul) completes the set.
All three are published by Guardian Books, and should be available via all good online bookstores.

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