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Shelf Awareness has had a bit of back-and-forth on the Kindle lately. MJ Rose, the "Reincarnationist" author, had a piece lauding the Kindle and describing getting a HarperCollins title before the print version was out. Today, Margot Sage-EL, an indie bookstore owner, wrote in a piece called "Leveling the E-Playing Field" that she was a bit taken aback by Rose's description of her local bookstore being too "out of the way", extolling the Kindle's convenience, and also upset that Harper had released the ebook version of the book before the print version.
So she wrote to Harper and they apologized, saying that the early Kindle release had actually been a mistake.
It kind of makes me sad to watch this, actually. I love independent bookstores - hell, I love B&N stores as well. But it's not that the playing field isn't level. It's a different field altogether.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I love the convenience of the Kindle. I love not HAVING to go out in the cold for my books - and to get them instantly without waiting for the mail to bring them. There is no way print can compete with that - no way at all.
That said, there are certain books I prefer to have in print than on the Kindle. Anything in the "Dummies" series, for example - that format is far more readable on paper than it is in reflowable text. Recently, my colleague Brian O'Leary recommended the book Slide:ology for our StartwithXML Forum - I would not want that book on my Kindle. It relies too heavily on graphics, and the points it makes would be lost on a Kindle. Diet books - with their charts and the pages you want to keep referring to - work much better in print. Inspirational books that are heavily formatted with call-outs - not so great for the Kindle.
So bookstores - indie or no - don't have to worry about those sorts of books; it'll be quite a while before Amazon and Apple figure out a way around those. But straight text - the bulk of most books - has found a friend in the ebook format. And rather than getting upset about it, it's probably time for bookshops to start figuring out how they're going to grapple with that.
What I offer:
