William Boyd Launches Library Ebook Lending Service

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William Boyd launched Kensington & Chelsea Library's new online digital borrowing service yesterday by reading an extract from the ebook version of one of his many bestsellers, Restless.

A library representative then explained how the new free ebook lending service works. The system is run by Overdrive (which powers W H Smith ebooks). There's no downloading, instead you get your ebooks/audiofiles for 3 weeks and then they disappear. That could be annoying if you're half way through a novel and you miss the reminder email, but all stock is accessible 24/7 for ordering and re-ordering and there are no fines. The files are compatible with both Apple and Microsoft computers, iPads, iPods, mobile phones including iPhones and Blackberrys but sadly not UKebookblog's favourite ereader the Kindle. Authors' rights aren't forgotten in all of this. The library pays a lending right fee. The more digital subscribers the library gets the more goes to the authors.

The floor was then opened up for a Q&A session with William.




'Ask me anything, anything you like,' he said. UKebookblog kicked off, asking if he had an ereader himself. He doesn't. He prefers hardbacks but can see how useful ereaders are, for travellers (and literary agents) especially, and thinks the time will come when, as an Apple man through and through, he'll succumb to an iPad. He added that he didn't hold the Luddite view that ebooks would destroy 'real' books. That one will replace the other: "Velcro came in a long time ago but buttons still exist."

The inevitable how do you write question produced an interesting answer. Unlike most successful authors, he doesn't have any book deals for unwritten novels. Instead he'll spend as much time as is needed travelling and researching, creating scenes and characters and plotting everything out in his mind. Then, with no pressure on his time at all, he'll settle down and write a first draft in longhand.

This is the stage he's at now with his next novel. He wouldn't say much about it except that it's set in Vienna, 1913, just before WW1 when an extraordinary mixture of characters were living there including Hitler and Freud. He won't deliver to Bloomsbury until he's written and rewritten "50,000 times" and everything is as good as he can make it. Which of course in his case has proved to be, time and time again, nothing short of masterly.

William Boyd to Launch Kensington & Chelsea Digital Public Library

On Monday 27 September at 4pm, novelist William Boyd will launch Kensington & Chelsea's digital public library service.

That's UKebookblog's local, and favourite library of all time, so we'll be there, notepad & camera at the ready.

Still An Incredible Lack of Understanding About Ebooks

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An interesting interview with  James Bridle has just been released on You Tube. 'James Bridle is impossible to classify,' say his interviewers at Publishing Perspectives. 'And if he hands you a business card, you might be surprised that it merely states his name with the instruction to “search."... He has helped to developed a range of innovative literary projects, including the Enhanced Editions e-reader, the Golden Notebook online and Granta.com. He makes things with words, books and the internet, and writes about what he does at booktwo.org.'

At Digital Book World there's a piece on the advantages independent publishers have over big publishers in the new emarketing world. Paolo Chikiamco from Rocket Kapre Books spoke on the subject at the Future of the Book Conference in Quezon City, Philippines on Monday.

"Publishing Industry Going Through Most Profound Revolution Since Gutenberg" - Back to Its Roots!

"Publishers are relevant," says head of Random House, Gail Rebuck, in today's Guardian. "We have practical expertise and, of course, money. We give our authors advances which enable them to concentrate on their work in hand … My idea of hell is a website with 80,000 self-published works on it – some of which might be jewels, but, frankly, who's got the time? What people want is selection and frankly that's what we do."

Selection is exactly what the new wave of specialist epublishers will be doing too. They'll:

Find the best new authors and then promote the best new authors. Authors who can already write. Who need editing, not ghosting. Who don't need to be famous in another field first. Whose careers won't rely on the whim of the big supermarket buyers. Who can be of any age and from any background.

Publishing is going back to its roots!

Forbes On Bright Future for Self-Published Authors

 

If Self-Published Authors Owned The Midlist

Forbes blogger Alan Rinzler reports on Author Solutions' marketing VP Keith Ogorek's prediction that the big publishing houses could one day find all their mid-list authors from amongst the self-published.

Ereaders will be adopted by majority of US readers by July 2013, predicts J A Konrath.

J A Konrath has just blogged his print to digital time-line.

He predicts that ereaders will be adopted by the majority of readers the US by July 2013, pointing out that between 2004 and 2006, sales of the iPod went from four million a year to forty million a year. "They are currently plateaued at over fifty million a year, and have been since 2007."