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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.
