Here Comes the e-book Revolution -- Mike Elgan

From the Reseller News
By Mike Elgan, Framingham Monday, February 23 2009

Here comes the e-book revolutionAt what temperature do electronic books catch fire? We're going to find out sometime this year because e-book sales are about to ignite, says Mike Elgan: Full Article can be read here.

"For authors, it can take months to even find a literary agent willing to represent their work. Then the agent takes months to find a publisher. Then it takes ages for the publishing company to get the book out there.

People are already circumventing all this by self-publishing. The self-publishing industry is the only area of paper-book publishing that's thriving right now. Soon enough, a huge number of authors are finally going to get fed up with the publishing industry and just self-publish electronically. They'll hire their own freelance editors and do the marketing themselves. The publication of a finished manuscript will take minutes, rather than months.

Old-school thinkers in the publishing industry will lament the slap-dash nature of self-published e-books, and sniff that books are no longer published with the quality and care that they used to achieve. (Never mind that book publishers abandoned high standards years ago in previous cost-cutting initiatives.) The world will pass them by as the book industry undergoes the same transition that happened with the media and blogs.

First, the media didn't understand blogs. Then they invalidated them. Then they accepted them. And now blogs are where the credibility is. Every columnist and reporter has a blog, and now major TV news programmes are built around the opinions of bloggers. A similar transformation will take place over the credibility of self-published and electronic books."