by Cathy Macleod, 31 January 2009.

Agatha Christie, Fay Weldon and Ann Morven have all embraced electronic publication as the ebook revolution gushes into the new year of 2009.

For evergreen Christie characters, such as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, it entails a reformat from the hardprint titles. But new Weldon and Morven titles, exclusively digital, can be read only on an electronic device. These may be handheld, laptop or desktop, the worldwide appliances that have changed reading habits.

Ann Morven, diva of the short whodunit, said her publishers had decided to issue her latest mystery in digital style only. It is a short story, “Birthday Snakes”, featuring the heavyweight chump of crime fiction, a female sleuth with   bumbling instinct for human frailty.

“My publishers have attracted on-screen readers for the past year by means of texts below 6000 words,” Ann Morven said. “This means short stories and serials. The reason  is simple. Booktrade watchers believe that to absorb a long digital novel needs practice when we are all used to paperbacks. People are still just bonding with their megabyte machines, whether mobile phone or a book-friendly computer.”

She revealed her own preference remained a hardprint paperback, but said she achieved “something of the same intimacy” reading a laptop loaded with the free Mobipocket Reader software.

Fay Weldon’s efiction is also being introduced in short takes. It appears in serialized episodes at YouGov.com, under the title “Woodworm”.

Fay Weldon says she welcomes feedback and is writing the chapters in a continuing plot that can be influenced by what followers of the serial suggest to her.

She is not the first to follow this course. Alexander McCall Smith began the interactive formula with “44 Scotland Street”, a serial in The Scotsman newspaper. Later, it was published as a hardprint book, and several more Scotland Street titles have followed involving the same characters.

McCall Smith is currently writing a similar serial for London’s Daily Telegraph. It features London dwellers and appears under the title of “Corduroy Mansions”. Significantly, the chapters are available for digital download at the newspaper’s website.

Books by the late Agatha Christie that will appear in digital format are, of course, already popular in hardprint. The digital publisher, Penguin in the United States, believes there is a new market in the electronic field.

Initially, ten digital titles will be published by this publisher, one of the global giants to recognize that ebooks are here to stay.

Up until 2008, it was small publishers who led the trend into ebooks. This was mainly an economic choice to avoid the crippling overheads of printing, binding, warehousing thousands of books, distributing them to bookshops, and receiving just 40% percent of the cover price. That 40% had to pay for all those things plus advances and royalties to authors and, perhaps, leave a small profit for the publisher.

Such an impossible business formula encouraged small publishers to try the alternative digital market, selling direct to readers. Their pioneering endeavour has shown the way to the global giants who now suffer in the world recession.

The year 2009, therefore, is going to mark out fresh focus on ebooks following dismal earnings from traditionally printed titles. The business world is well into electronic documents, so is the world of education, where text books now come on a screen.

Fiction will enjoy its best digital year yet, because what was once a trickle has become a torrent.
Note this: “Read an ebook week” is March 8-14. Lots of promotional goodies offered! Details at www.ebookweek.com

Happy reading!     This from Cathy Macleod at booktaste.com