The Wall Street Journal reports Dorchester Publishing embracing the eBook Revolution and digital publishing by abandoning traditional print books for digital options.
This after the States’ oldest mass paperback publisher watched a decline in orders from its key retail accounts produce a 25% drop in last year’s sales.
This is actually good news for writers and readers. eBooks and print-on-demand technology allows publishers to offer their entire back-list of out-of-print books.
We’ve been waiting for this development for some time, yah?
Please follow and like us:
1 comment
I’m not so sure that this is a good thing. Many of the popular authors that are/were with Dorchester do not have e-books in their contracts; depending on what their contracts say the authors could get screwed over big time (I know of at least one that has pulled out of Dorchester and has been with them for fifteen years). Another big question though is what reader format will Dorchester be using (I see the e-readers now as video was back in the 80’s…too many formats without compatibility between them…think Betamax, Laser Disc, etc).
I use Mobipocket and have several e-books that I have purchased that way…but I use a Pocket PC that is fairly old and would like to upgrade to a Droid; Mobipocket, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t support Droid. Then, there are publishers that did release books on Mobipocket format that have pulled those from that format. It leaves the end user at a loss as to what to do when it comes to e-books…at least the print version doesn’t require software and can’t be lost when and electronic device dies.