{"id":81,"date":"2004-04-12T11:59:20","date_gmt":"2004-04-12T09:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=81"},"modified":"2004-04-12T11:59:20","modified_gmt":"2004-04-12T09:59:20","slug":"hooked-on-ebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/hooked-on-ebooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Hooked on ebooks"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can also listen to this essay on Radio LabourStart<\/a> or read it in print in next month’s issue of Labour Research<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

Seven Stories Press<\/a> is a US publisher you probably never heard of. But you have heard of some of their authors (like Noam Chomsky) and if you’re reading this, you’d probably be intrigued by some of their titles (such as “10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF and the World Bank”).
\nLike many other publishers, Seven Stories began experimenting with electronic books (ebooks) some time ago, but sales were slim. The various gadgets built to display ebooks never really took off. People didn’t like reading books on their computer screens.<\/p>\n


\nAnd then Seven Stories tried something new — ebooks in a format compatible with Palm handheld computers, sold through Palm Digital Media<\/a>. According to a report last autumn, there was then a “rather thrilling surge of ebook sales,” said Lars Reilly from Seven Stories.
\nBack then Palm was selling several hundred thousand ebooks a year directly from its website. Today the numbers are certainly higher as Palm was reporting double-figure percentage growth in 2003.
\nWhat’s made the change possible is the tremendous improvement in screen quality and useability in the new handheld devices.
\nEbooks have numerous advantages over “real” books — including ecological ones — but probably most compelling for me is the fact that I can carry dozens of books with me while I travel, all contained within a single, light gadget. When I read in a place with poor lighting, the Palm excells — the contrast on its screen is far better than what I’d have were I reading off paper.
\nAnd there’s a wonderful immediacy to the whole process. When the US government’s counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke released his bestselling book<\/a> trashing the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror, I was able to begin reading it on my handheld literally two minutes after seeing it mentioned on the web. There is simply no faster way to get hold of a book.
\nI realize that most of you have never read an ebook, but statistics show that once you’ve crossed that barrier, you are likely to get hooked. Palm Digital Media reports that it is not unusual to find customers buying 50 or 100 titles. The hurdle is getting them to buy and read their first ebook. The savings to publishers (and readers) could be enormous, allowing us to publish and to read books which might otherwise never have seen the light of day.
\nAs I read about Seven Stories’ success, the thought crossed my mind that other progressive publishers might want to follow their example. Or indeed that we in the labour movement and left might consider reviving something like the legendary “Left Book Club<\/a>” which so successfully brought socialist literature to a wide audience a few generations back. Organizations that already publish books for social change — including LRD<\/a>, the Fabians<\/a>, Pluto Press<\/a>, Verso<\/a> and so on — could pool their resources, and offer low-cost digital versions of many of their titles to subscribers who would be rewarded initially with a free Palm computer.
\nMaybe the time has come for a “Left Ebook Club.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can also listen to this essay on Radio LabourStart or read it in print in next month’s issue of Labour Research. Seven Stories Press is a US publisher you probably never heard of. But…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-labour-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}