Remember when you would borrow a book you saw laying around in the house of your friend/aunt/cousin? Reading in those days was simply a matter of seeing something you thought you might like and borrowing or buying it where it stood.
I remember my first Stephen King buy: It. (I think I may have talked about it before). I had never heard of him before that day, and I came across his book by walking into a hotel gift store. This is what the cover looked like for me:
Scary, no? To be honest, I can’t be sure whether my dislike for clowns came before or after this particular novel, in any case, I now associate clowns with King’s very unclownlike villain in this piece.
I didn’t want this to be about the book It, but rather about how we buy or borrow books. In those days, it was all about the cover and what you could read on the back cover that drew you in. For some, it was about what you [ more ]
And just when we thought that eBooks were going to take over the world, the news of at least two authors who are sticking with the printed book. Richard Russo and Stephen King have both promised that their next novels are not going to be offered electronically. In King’s case, he adds “for the time being” which sort of implies that he hasn’t closed the door on the idea.
Russo says he wants to support the traditional bookstore model and the notion of local buying; so his next novel, a collaboration between himself and his daughter, is going to be published by a publishing house located in his hometown. Both Russo and King state that eBooks alone aren’t enough and King goes as far as to say that “readers don’t regard electronic books as real books”.
Now I don’t know about you, but for me, the reading is primarily about the words and secondarily about the medium those words are delivered to me. I am not sure I care whether the book is available in print or not, so long as [ more ]