First, the info dump: Last week, Amazon Publishing had its very first million-copy-selling author. The imprint is AmazonCrossing, the author is Oliver Pötzch, and the figures are the combined print, audio, and eBook sales of his Hangman’s Daughter series. Pötzch’s books were originally published in his native German and subsequently acquired and translated by Amazon for digital distribution.
Now, the question: What does this mean? Smarter people than I can investigate the business ramifications of this. But my research to make heads or tails of this development has brought me up against a lot less examination and a lot more feelings. Amazon seems to be a lynchpin. It’s at the center of the push and pull between print and digital; and the loudest voices are emotional ones.
I’ve written about this before: I love a good brick-and-mortar bookstore, and I love holding a physical book in my hands. (And perhaps, selfishly, I love showing off my small library to people as well.) But what I love more is people reading. And right now, we can see teens buying more books more quickly than ever, and it’s all thanks to them embracing eBooks and discovering reading material through social networking. We’re going to get a generation of literate readers because good books are more accessible and kids are talking about them.
“You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn’t know this, of course you still can’t understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that’s what counts.”
When it comes to reading, it’s not the mode of delivery, it’s the content.
—Michael
Tags: amazon, digital, ebooks