Once again, I was scrolling down my FB newsfeed, looking for interesting books to download. And I found several to investigate further. I one-clicked a cute holiday romance. Then I went over to what appeared to be an interesting suspense. Except it was only available in paperback. That's right, folks, no ebook version.
Yep, jaw dropper right there. But it wasn't over. Saw a non-fiction, true-crime I wanted. Clicked over to Amazon... No ebook version for that one either. Derp.
WTF?
Ebook is the easiest and cheapest version to create - even if you pay someone else to do your formatting. Now, I can certainly understand if you have a book that's full of graphics that might not translate well to an ereader. But, as far as I could tell, neither of those books fit the description.
Maybe the author is anti-ebook. Maybe they don't own an ereader. But either of those instances still seem to me to be 'cutting off your nose to spite your face'.
Maybe it was the publisher. I don't remember where the fiction was published, but the NF was out of University of Michigan. Umm. If your publisher won't do ebooks, maybe you should find another publisher or do it your own damn self, because you're cutting out a huge... HUGE... section of the marketplace.
My point? Both of those books lost a sale and a possible review. Probably not a huge amount of money, but hey, every little bit helps. And my reviews are good reviews - unless I don't review because I didn't like the book.
For the love of Pete, don't do this. Get your books out there in electronic versions.
It stuns me when I see this...and I still do every few months or so. Ebooks are easy to upload. I just don't get it.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think a university press would be more "tech" savvy! And that's one of the problems I have with a local writing group. There are those "old skoolers" who poo-poo ebooks as not real books. Of course, they feel the same way about romance, romantic suspense, or anything with romance attached to it. Grrrr. But yeah, why cut yourself out of half (or more) of the reading audience? Makes no sense to me.
ReplyDeleteNot smart. Even a book with 700 illustrations wasn't that hard to turn into an ebook. Time consuming, but even a lowly intern or TA could do it in a day or two, unless the pictures were badly sized. In that case, it could take a week.
ReplyDeleteNo excuse for no ebook!