Blast from the past

[elf]

Got caught up reading Making Light recently, where they're talking about ebook scams and piracy (the real kind, where people sell authors' works w/o permission, not the unauthorized-free-copy kind that's harder to prove damage from), and I wound up looking for Rowling's reasons for not releasing ebooks.

Her two stated reasons were "piracy concerns" and something about wanting people to experience "real" books, which I couldn't find a decent quote about; I know it exists somewhere. What I did find instead, from USA Today in 2005:

J.K. Rowling has not permitted any of the six Potter books to be released in electronic form, not even during the peak of the e-book craze a few years ago.

Emphasis added. Oh, my sides hurt. The peak of the ebook craze: 2001-2003. Damn, the web is bringin' the funny today. I am tempted to send Konrath a link so he can share the giggle over the short-sightedness of mainstream publishing.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

That's hilarious. I wonder what they were talking about?

[elf]

I'm trying to figure that out. In 2005, ereader was competing with mobipocket for industry dominance, Amazon started selling weirdly-DRM'd PDFs (could only print a limited number of pages, and the verification issues were nightmarish), Baen's free library had been active 5 years and Webscriptions was a decent buying system (now, Webscriptions seems clunky; we put up with it 'cos we love Baen's books). The EBookwise 1150 was the new shiny hardware, and too expensive for me but I wanted one.

I started buying ebooks in 2005. I knew I wasn't an early adopter, but I can't imagine anyone who'd looked at the industry thinking it was on the downside.

[yourlibrarian]

Speaking as someone who was in library science research at the time, I can tell you no one thought it was at any kind of rise or tipping point then. I still remember when Time magazine came out with the article about the Kindle. My class of reference students weren't impressed and still thought eReaders were a long way from becoming popular, and that was among a group of people who might be expected to be big readers and early technology adopters.