Trapdoor Books

A Wall Street Journal article, Mass Paperback Publisher Goes All Digital, is an interesting look at the other side of electronic book publishing – the negative impact on traditional publishers who are not well positioned to break the distribution and wholesale chain.

Dorchester Publishing – famed for its mass-market romance novels – has seen sales of traditional books fall by 25% last year. This is interesting because their primary market focus has been on older women readers who have embraced new e-book readers – supposedly because of the ability to change font sizes.

An article last week in the NY Times entitled, E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text, lightly touches on the first forays into the electronic book revolution.

I like the adjectives used by the publishers to describe the new generation of e-books: enriched, amplified, enhanced. Very cool. While publishers can’t decide what to call these new book formats, there seems to be general agreement that this phenomena has been kick-started by the arrival of the iPad – which really opens up the possibility of what interactive books are all about.

Recently, there have been a number of interesting articles published about the advances of electronic books – far from the droll reviews of the Kindle and Nook. These are glimpsing the real future of e-books and some of the technological leaps that forward-looking publishing houses are making. I’ll post a few over the next couple of days with links to the articles for those of you who want to look into the crystal ball.

Electronic reading devices are transforming the concept of a book – LA Times.

This article dismisses the myth that reading is a solitary endeavor – reading is a community affair; readers have a desire to reach out to authors and each other for collaboration and fellowship.

The smell of e-books just got better

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?

Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?

If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.

But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.

Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much.

One of our hippest readers shot me this Wall Street Journal article about a famous Japanese author, Ryu Murakami, skirting his traditional publisher to put his book out directly to iPad. A horror story for Trapdoor Books?

Not hardly. Here’s why.

If Trapdoor Books doesn’t add anything to the value chain, then we deserve to be skirted.

Several key points.

First, the author is already famous. There are quite a few doors that open when your name will draw a legion of fans to buy your novel. For every Murakami, there are thousands of authors – many of them extremely talented – whose name does not have the draw necessary to pull this off.