E-Books, Grisham, and Does It Mean Anything?

John Grisham, a longtime holdout on e-books, is letting his entire backlist become Kindle-available.

“It’s too late for that, because there already was a corpse in the coffin, and those nails have already been driven,” said Otto Penzler, who has operated The Mysterious Book Shop for 31 years, continuing to struggle as he watched most of his fellow indie shops close. “One more author going to the dark side doesn’t make a difference, and I didn’t sell much Grisham anyway. It certainly is going to make a difference to Barnes & Noble and Borders.”

Just several years ago, Border and B&N were driving indy bookstores out of business. Now they are being driven out of business by Amazon. Not a very long reign at the top. Drug dealers last longer.

What are my thoughts on e-books? Not much. I was an early kindle adopter because I got one as a gift. I don’t use it much anymore, partially because I still get so many books as gifts and am a huge fan of used books (from stores or amazon) that tangible books are still cheaper for me. The big advantage of the kindle is being able to read manuscripts (for my job) without wasting paper to print. The newer DX kindle is big and is great for reading scripts…except I have the old version, which is terrible for scripts.

In my personal experience, I don’t buy fewer books because of Kindle. I read more.