Downloads Top Album Sales For the First Time

Something we all know has arrived. The download is now preeminent in the music world and those CD players we have are now in the junk heap of history. Sure Sure. People will still buy a physical medium to claim ownership, but that accessibility will trump ownership eventually and the digital medium is proving it more every day. A million kindles sold every week by Amazon. A million. If the writing gets any bigger on the wall there will be no more wall.

Not that books are songs. They are not. Readers are a persnickety group and a lot of people will prefer the book, but when my eighty nine year old father in-law and my eighty year old mother in-law are sitting in their La-Z boys hunched over their Kindle screens then something is definitely up. The speed of this transition is taking away our collective breath and is already leaving authors and publishers scrambling to keep up. The proof is in the download.

The Kindle is not the IPOD. Not yet anyway. You still want a break from the Kindle with a book. I know I do and have read the last three novels in the old paper format. Music has no such physical drawbacks. In fact having all your music in your pocket is fantastic compared to carrying around a bulky CD player or worse a boom box. But, portability is a big factor in the Kindle reader also. You don't lug books, but the tech revolution of the IPOD just doesn't seem as much of a Watershed as the Kindle. It is still a better tactile experience to read a book if not visually as well.

But the Kindle is still evolving. Paper screens may not be far off along with brighter screens that are easier on the eye. Who knows, maybe they will even get that pulpy old book smell puffing out as you read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...a hilarious well written novel about one mans search for the new American Dream James Frey

On Downloading Books

The fear for writers is that their books will all be stolen now. That a mass download will steal away all copyrights. This is happening. People are ripping books the way they rip songs. You can't stop it. So what does it mean to writers. A couple things. One. You will get read by more people. Two. You will probably get less money. A bad thing. But there is no way around it. The digital revolution is here and just about any medium is fair game. Look at the way the studios are freaking out now.

Limewire and Napster used to be the pirate sites. Amazing. You could just log in and start downloading songs. Suddenly you were not paying fifteen dollars for a CD. You were paying nothing. And you could get a thousand songs if you wanted them. Then Napster was shut down. Then Limewire, but now there is YouTube and UTorrent and a hundred other sites for music and movies and now books. 

The one saving grace for writers is this. A lot of people still like books. In fact the boomers prefer books and there are a lot of boomers. Reading on a screen is reading on a screen no matter how good it looks or sounds or even smells like a book. Not to say people won;t migrate into Kindle land but there will be a group that just won't go for the download. They will plunk down their money and take their pulp and hit their hammock and read a book.

For the rest of the populace Ok with reading on their PDA or their IPAD or their computer or their Kindle or their Nook or their Sony reader, then it is every writer for himself. Maybe we can get a few nickels from those downloads. Some have gotten millions. So it comes back down to a basic question for the writer. Why did you write in the first place? For the money? Or to be read. If your answer is both, then it might still work out for you. If your answer is be read, then no worries.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle or Paperback

The Lasitude of Writing in the Digital Age

Writing in the digital age can be depressing. We hear of Google digitizing millions of books and millions of people self publishing and how books will be downloaded from sites all over creation and who will pay for these pirated books anymore? Serious writers making their living shiver. There seems to be no end to the leaking ship royalty and why should anyone bother when a twenty six year old can pop a bunch of troll novels online and make millions? Well that's not really why you write now is it?

No. Certainly there is a higher calling but making a buck is not to be trivialized. It comes in pretty handy down here bub as George Bailey said to his guardian angel and so worrying about the IPOD era of books is as silly as worrying about aging. You can not control either. But we should understand we are not in the Fitzgerald Perkins era of publishing anymore, if we ever were.

You could make a case that literary fiction might be circling the grave. Not that people don't appreciate literary fiction, but like grass being pushed out by weeds the mid list author is close to being moribund. There is just so much accessible fiction that the extra effort will not occur for many readers. And to that end the digitization of writing has had an effect. Ease of use is not be shrugged away.

Still, a good story is a good story and people will pay for a good story. We are humans. Humans want to understand their place in the world every day. We see ourselves in a story and it gives us comfort and takes us away for a little while. So yes the times are more trying with so much out there now, but talent does still rise to the top along with the cream. Maybe it just takes a little longer now to find that blade of grass in all those weeds.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off July 26th