Modern Marginalia

Upcoming purchases: Rachel Kramer Bussel's Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women and Best Sex Writing 2008.

Hey, I write erotica. Surely you'd expect me to read it?

First, the release of my first novel, Inequities, as an e-book made me re-evaluate how I felt about the relationship other people might have with my book. I realized I didn't want the relationship to be a tenuous thing, lasting only as long as their accounts with the said manufacturer of their electronic readers. I wanted them to have a lasting fondest for my novel, born of a good read. I wanted them to own my novel and claim as their own.

The second discovery spun out of my own experiences as a consumer and reader. As divorced as I had become from the mass market paperback, I thought I wouldn't really care about books that I bought from Sony.

I was wrong.

To my surprise, using the Sony Reader brought pleasure back to reading. By removing the personal restrictions I had grown to loathe in the paperback format and substituting this new vehicle for reading, I reconnected with books that had become disposal to me. My rekindled fondest for them changed my sense of investment in them.

Other activities reinforced my reconstituted desire for ownership: grabbing Tor's (and other publisher's) promotional freebies, buying non-DRMed e-books, and gathering together all the e-books I'd collected over the years. The concrete experience of placing all these books in a folder labeled My Ebooks was, I found, no different in meaning or pleasure than lining them up on a shelf on a bookcase.

Now I look at my Sony purchases and long to add them to that folder. But I can't.

I doubt that I'll stop buying books from Sony – Give me books or give me death! – but I am developing compensating strategies. I'll probably build a data base of loved e-books that I'll carry with me on used bookstore jaunts. That way, I can buy in paper what I can't actually own electronically. I'll probably buy new at a discount as well. Or at full price if the author's a friend, acquaintance, or much admired by moi.

Plus, I can wait for the DRM issue to play out. It will probably take publishers longer than the music industry to shake off their fear of this brave new e-world, but today's new read is tomorrow's backlist. Perhaps generating backlist sales will be the starting place for the book industry to drop its reliance on DRM. They have less to loose once that old advance has been recouped and more to gain – namely, in happy e-book consumers poised to become repeat buyers.

For now, it's pleasant enough to know that owning the reading experience has incurred the desire for a fuller claim to the book itself.

Publishers Weekly supplied a response from Ingrams, Amazon main POD competitor, and I have to say, John Ingram certainly has my respect. Not only is he tempered in his response, but his company thought to actively recruit small publishers to the POD model by providing a program that provided meaningful and bottom-line worthy benefits.

I'm not about to tell you whether or not to buy from Amazon, but I've provided additional on-line bookstores that carry Inequities -- Barnes and Noble, Borders, Powell's. You can decide how you feel about this matter and how you want to address it.

And as an FYI, let me point you to this Teleread entry. It's a solid summary and quite elucidating.