Interesting Times and Chinese Curses

The times they are a-changing.

My  favorite quote from the NJRW conference last weekend was from Alicia Condon, Editorial Director of the Brava imprint at Kensington.  She pointed out that the line, "May you live in interesting times" comes from a Chinese curse. Yes, a curse.

Given all the conflicting predictions, dire and hopeful, floating around right now about the future of publishing, while the "experts" might not agree on much, there's no denying that the industry is going through some pretty intense changes and will continue to over the near future.

And the curse might lie mostly in the uncertainty. Publishing is stressful enough without all this dang extra uncertainty!

I'm not one to buy into all the dire, sky-is-falling predictions about publishing. I do, however, think that the publishing industry (and authors) need to educate the public--as the music industry did back in the Napster days--that downloading creative media for free, when it hasn't been offered for free by the creator or rights holder, is STEALING.

Yes, some people will always steal, but most people who'd never consider stealing a book from a bookstore might now download a book they find on the internet without batting an eyelash. And I think the generation currently hitting adulthood have been conditioned to think that any content on the internet is free for the taking and should be. So that's an issue... And a big one. But if handled, it shouldn't spell the end of getting paid to write books.

Another negative prediction I've heard that rang true for me, is that publishers might stop printing ANY copies of books that aren't expected to be bestsellers... (They are already cutting back on print runs, big time, and expecting much higher overall sell-throughs.) And this means that many (most) authors might see a day, fairly soon, when we can't actually hold our books... Sad, but...

I also think that, especially for genre fiction which has a huge established fan-base, e-books and e-readers could actually be a boon.

The reason I jump to this conclusion (instead of thinking the sky is falling) is because e-readers make impulse buys so much easier. I recently bought a kindle and I've bought a few books already that I was curious about, and/or wanted to buy to support the author, but that I might not have bought in print because, well, in print then I'd have to deal with storing the physical book and anyone who's been to my house knows I already have a serious book storage problem and it's becoming hard to spot my bed behind the huge mountain of books that surrounds it.

So, as much as I know I can't predict the future, I do expect that e-readers will lead avid readers to buy and read more books, not fewer. On the other hand, readers who tend to pick up one or two books a year, might not buy an e-reader, and if the publishers stop printing mid-list authors, this reader will only ever see the few books that retailers put in stores... But then again, the reader who only buys one or two books a year, was probably only ever picking up those bestselling books, anyway.

Who the heck knows...

But one thing is certain. Those of us trying to survive in the publishing world do live in interesting times.

Consider yourself cursed. :)

Has anyone else bought an e-reader? Which one? How do you like it?