As the publisher of both ebooks—11 to date, with two more just acquired—as well as paperbacks, I think Cantarabooks has made a pretty good showing in the past two and three-quarter years years in the rapidly growing field of electronic publishing. When we started releasing ebooks early in 2007, Amazon had already come out with their first version of the Kindle, and for a time we considered releasing our ebook titles exclusively through them. What stopped us?

• The price of the Kindle itself—at US$399, it was going to be out of reach for most of the readers we were courting in America.
• It was also at the time entirely unavailable in Europe, Israel and Australia, where our audience was growing. (This just changed today.)
• For a publisher to upload files to the Kindle system required and still requires exclusive and tricky formatting.
• The Amazon-publisher payment split was, and I believe still is, 70-30 on the retail price.
• Amazon reserved the right to set the retail price, which would never be lower than US$9.99.
• Titles aren’t sold in units, but “beamed” to your device.
• Readers therefore didn’t purchase books on Kindle, their merely bought the license to read them for an indefinite duration of time. (This little-known clause, which still applies, was publicly revealed recently in a student’s lawsuit against Amazon for recalling his copy of 1984, taking with their recall his school notes!)
• The Kindle was inspiring rivals for the monopoly on dedicated e-readers, and we wanted to see how it would stand up to the competition.

My own personal dedicated e-reader was at the time—and continues to be—the Ebookwise 1150, a reliable reader which I’ve owned since 2004. At the time it cost US$99, now it’s $109.95 for the basic version, making it still the cheapest on the market. Not only have I re-read classics like Ulysses on it (Ebookwise’s partner, Fictionwise, has a huge library, much of it for free), I’ve also read .doc, .rtf and .pdf manuscipts on it, using the Ebookwise Librarian (their add-on which costs $15) to upload. My Ebookwise is light, portable, easy to hold, has a readable screen, and I can change text size, bookmark pages, highlight passages, make notes, search for key words and hyperlink to other parts of the book.

I considered, briefly, publishing for the Ebookwise format through Fictionwise. Fictionwise’s emphasis, however, is on genre works; Cantarabooks is a literary press. Last year I considered publishing on the Kindle again when Tom, a friend and well-known screenwriter, asked me to consider acquiring his first book, an excellent but “unclassifiable” novel that even his agent in New York, Al Zuckerman, a top-tier agent if there ever was one, couldn’t seem to place. (Just to show you the state of mainstream publishing today.) Tom would have been very happy to be published, even on the Kindle, as long as the book somehow “got out there”… So I took a straw poll of our mutual friends in the Hollywood business (his likeliest audience)—and while most of them, well-heeled types as they were, said that while they were curious about the Kindle and eager to purchase one for the novelty, it was unlikely that any of them would ever use it for reading, either professionally or for pleasure. It didn’t seem to offer the satisfaction of one or the other.

Perhaps that’s the big drawback. Team blogger Marc here at IndieBookMan pointed out in an earlier posting that the tactile delight of a paperback book would always win out over the dazzle of gizmos, but I think it goes a little beyond that. New York professionals, for whom constant reading is necessary component of their job, love the Kindle because it makes their job easier. Simple as that. As for bringing to the beach, to the park or to the bathtub—not one of these reading professionals has failed to point out that the Kindle is just not cut out for such quotidianal pleasures. Might a glare-free, dust-free or waterproof Kindle help? Maybe, maybe not. The problem is, the Kindle is still associated with uses by the media, and even lowering the price to an affordable hundred bucks or so might not overcome this impression for the general reading population.

If you read this far, I’m sure your question to us at this point would be, Well, if you aren’t publishing on Kindle or Ebookwise, how do you publish your ebooks? Simple. We publish in PDF, good old reliable PDF that can be read on any platform and on any computer, whether laptop or console. Our ebooks are easy to store, easy on the eyes (the aesthetic appeal of our ebooks and our PDF magazine Cantaraville has been regularly praised), easy to read, easy to purchase and download from anywhere in the world, easy to print out and easy to make notes on. Further, none of our ebooks costs more than US$4.95 and we see no need to increase the price in the near future. Overhead being minimal, we can afford to pay our authors above-average percentage in royalties. We’re making money, not a lot, but more important, our authors are making a few dollars—and they’re being read all over the world.

If you’re at the advanced stage of the ebook debate, you might ask if, by sticking with PDFs, Cantarabooks is really preparing for the future. Besides the beauty and ease that PDFs offer, consider these three points:

• Academics and professionals have been used to reading white papers and journals in PDF for over ten years now. Reading for intellectual pleasure in this format is only a minor step in viewpoint for them.
• Steve Jobs once predicted that the future of ebooks would be dominant in more portable, multi-task laptop computers, such as netbooks—which is an idea I love. Devices that are dedicated to one function, such as the Kindle, will continue to exist, but may well end up remaining chiefly as a tool of media profesisonals.
• For ebooks to thrive, they must intrinsically contain the quotidianal pleasure of reading. They’ve got to be part of the fabric of our daily lives and so far, of all the electronic devices the greater part of the population has grown used to, it’s still the laptop.

Your comments are welcome.

GET THE GOODS ON THE INDIE WORLD. GET CANTARANEWS.