THE IMPORTANCE OF PRINT

I've had this blog post revolving around in my head for some time now. I have a whole long list of other posts coming, I'll tell you about them later. However, I wanted to start this series: Why I Believe Print Books are Still Important.

In an era where authors are plentiful, electronics are the norm, and many are bypassing traditional publishing in hopes of making it big online, why would an author bother with getting their book made in paper format?

There are a many reasons not to abandon the traditional paper-page book. I’m going to talk about three of the major ones I have perceived.

First of all, there are people still out there like me. I do not have an e-reader device, and I vehemently refuse to get one. I do not read books or anything longer than a blog post on my computer. Reading books on a screen gives me a headache and diminishes the pleasure of the activity. People like me still exist. I can’t be the only person to feel this way.

Second, I have talked to many readers, many of whom I don’t know except through cyber-space, and even the ones who own e-readers and love them will admit that they still buy their favorite books in paperback or hardback, that they prefer the reading experience with an actual, physical book, and that their e-reader is for classes, traveling, or trying out a book before buying it.

 Third, as I’ve chatted with people on goodreads, it sounds as though the frenzy of e-book-buying is (by many accounts) slowing down. When e-readers came out, many books (even traditionally published ones) were available for 99 cents to 3 dollars. This, I believe, was the publishers working with e-reading manufacturing companies to give people an incentive to pay the hundreds of dollars for the e-reading device itself. Once the market was saturated with e-readers, publishing companies pushed the prices of their e-books back up to nearly as much (and in some cases more) than the print copies. To say that readers were disappointed by this is an understatement. The "instant fame" available to new and aspiring authors in 2010 through e-readers has also died down considerably. Readers are not so willing to spend even a paltry 99 cents on an unknown or self-published author, because they've now been burned too many times by those who haven't bothered to edit their work before handing it to readers.

So that is why I believe paper-page books are not ready to die just yet. I’m not saying I’m anti-e-versions. On the contrary, my own book is available on Kindle. But there are still a lot of pros to having paper-versions of your book out there. More on this in a later post which will discuss two more pros that having a paper-format of your book can lend to an author: Book Signings and Credibility.