Password Incorrect Blog

Mobile Ebooks, Self-publishing, Digital Storytelling

Mobile world: mobile fiction: eBooks

E-books have happily gone through the desktop phase. Now their destinations are eReaders, tablets and mobile phones. There is a place in this world for fiction books.

Please read this great guest post about it. His author is a fellow mobile fiction writer – Small Stories.

You can subscribe to Small Stories at Posterous. Please visit also his writing website as well as a collection of pictures made with an iPhone.

Small Stories’ books, all of them, are a fantastic choice for mobile readers. Download them for free from Feedbooks.

It’s true we increasingly live in a mobile world but it seems to be having a more rapid change that I imagined a year or so ago.

Take eBooks for example, everyone is trying to get into or investigate them, changing behaviour, and reading trends.

Google thinks the desktop will be irrelevant in three years – everything will come from the cloud and the Internet browser, through devices like the iPhone or iPad. Apple don’t call themselves a computer company any more. They say they are a mobile devices company.

So the momentum is there.

Publishers know it too and don’t want people to flock over or come to expect cheap ebooks. They want to make the business model profitable, they want to control prices. As a result they’re working hard to get consumers to pay hardback prices for ebooks.

New eBooks will, they hope, sell for a premium and gradually go down in price using a three tier price structure.

To get away with this they will need to pull off the same move the film industry did moving from VHS to DVD … up the price and sell quality and extra features. It was the expensive (at the time DVD) that needed a directors commentary and extras to justify the price hike.

Fine then. If that’s what they want bring on those extra features, interviews, author commentaries, videos, images from the book tour, etc … If I love a book enough that might persuade me.

It already has … The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave came as an enhanced edition for the iPhone for the same price as a hardback but it was still a bargain.

Why?

Because it came with a free audiobook read out by Nick Cave. It was brilliant, like having him over for the evening to read the thing out to me. It was a great book and a beautifully designed iPhone app.

So it seems people don’t mind paying a little extra than they thought (as Apple knows) so long as we get something of perceived value in return.

Mobile fiction has a fantastically exciting time ahead of it. Starting with the iPhone and more importantly the iPad …

Stay tuned :)