Starfish Publishing

Ebooks or Print?

2012-01-30T15:42:00.000-08:00

By Martin Willoughby

Continuning the theme of the conflict between the two, and where would fiction be without conflict, here's my take on the future of both.

First up, I don't believe that printed books will die out for a long time and maybe never. There will always be a market for them and not just an exclusive one for rich people, collectors and luddites. There is something pleasant about holding a physical object that you won't get with an ebook, someting that a data file cannot replace.

Whether the book remains in paperback, itself a relatively recent invention, or shrinks back to the hardback format remains to be seen. For publishers, pushing the exclusivity of a hardback may be a good marketing tool and the paperback will be allowed to die. Or it may be the other way round as paperbacks are cheaper to produce. It may even be that print and ebook will sit side by side and we'll see an increase in the total sales of books.

The printed book, however, won't die out.

The future of the ebook is hard to see, but there are some technological developments that are about to change how we view it.

The first problem is the reader itself. It's not the bulk or weight of it that matters at the moment, they wil get less of a problem as time moves on, but the cost. The cheapest ones are £89, and though that is below the £100 threshold where people generally consider an item easily replaceable, it's still not that cheap. Would you take it on holiday and leave it on the lounger when you go into the pool for a swim? Neither would I.

Thnings, however, are about to change. A British company has developed a computer for £5 that is the size of a credit card. While you won't be able to play Call of Duty on it, you will be able to browse the web and read ebooks. And at £5 are you going to be that worried about losing an item that's less than the price of a paperback or a swimming costume?

No one I know is going want a screen that small, but what about the future book buyers who are already living their lives on androids and iphones? When this technology is developed further, we may see book sized computers for £10, still not an immense amount of money.

The other question is 'what happens to the books on your reader if it's stolen?' Not much. Register a new kindle on Amazon to replace the one that was stolen and you can redownload all your books without paying again. Try doing that in Waterstones, even if you do have the receipt.

The future of ebooks and print books is hazy at the moment and no one can say for sure what the future holds. The only thing certain is what we see now is only a precursor to the shape of things to come.

To Ebook Or Not To Ebook...

2012-01-25T10:24:00.000-08:00

Posted by: D R Cartwright

To begin our blogger journey, we've decided to spend the first round joining in the ever-growing ebook v's traditional book argument. We'll begin with my view and follow up with another.

Hmmm...to ebook or not to ebook: that is the question.

Okay, so because I have a book published and available for amazon kindle, does this make me 100% for the ebook side? Not necessarily.

I am hugely traditional. I love the smell of a book, the feel of the pages and the sounds they make as you flick through the story. And I love the look of them stacked in a bookshelf, their colourful spines greeting you happily every time you walk up to them. Nothing beats a good book - but I am overly aware of the growing demand for ebooks. They're on the rise. We can't hide from them and hope they'll go away, because let's face it, that's not going to happen any time soon. I think we should accept that they're there and include them in our plans.

There are a lot of good points about ebooks too. There are an abundant of good reads available to download that are cheaper and don't take up any space. Ereaders are also light to hold so your hands won't start to ache half an hour into reading War and Peace, and there's no chance of a random page being ripped out (usually the very last page) so that you can't complete your story. You can store as many books as you want (within reason) on an Ereader and is so much handier than taking four individual books on holiday, especially if your luggage has a weight limit.

Ebooks are now part of the publishing world. I don't think they will ever replace the proper book, but it's nice for readers to have a choice on how they want to read. With the growing market, I think any publisher who snubs the idea of ebooks are only going to be cutting their nose off to spite their face. They'll be losing out on a lot of money. It's big business.

However, one thing I'm not too keen about is how easy it is for anyone to self publish. I may sound hypocritical now, seeing as I have self published this very way, but by doing so has cut a huge corner off the publishing process. Publishers and editors have slush piles for a reason. They have editing filters for a reason. Self publishing on the likes of amazon cuts out that whole process. Therefore when you download an ebook, there's no real guarantee that it will be to the same quality you'd normally get from the likes of Hodder and MacMillan. I'm not saying they're all like that. If you dig deep you can find some real gems, but the ebook bookshelves are fast becoming a publisher's slush pile, and is another reason why I believe that if you want to make a huge successful career as an author, you go the traditional route.

So, in conclusion to my rant: Ebooks Vs Traditional book? Both. Embrace paper and electronic; give the consumer the choice they want with their books and you can't go wrong.

The Blog Of Starfish Publishing

2012-01-24T11:16:00.000-08:00

Posted By: D R Cartwright

Bonjour and welcome to the blog of Starfish Publishing.

Before we delve into some kind of blogging routine, I thought I'd take this opportunity to introduce who we are and where Starfish Publishing came from.

We are a group of writers belonging to a Writers' Circle. We meet up once a week to either talk about writing, to critque each other's work, or to often write short, random pieces of flash fiction inspired by an exercise. Our main purpose though is to offer the kind of support that writer's need - the sort of support that is invaluable and often hard to find. We writers need that support. When struggling along the road of writing, hoping that the end leads you to success, you need to know if you're making errors along the way. You may not be able to see these errors, but other writers probably will. That's what we do.

And when we're not doing that, we're working on our new project, Starfish PC. Originally Starfish PC stood for Starfish Publishing Cupboard. We're far too small to be a publishing house - or even just a single room, for that matter - but then it evolved into a Cooperation.

We all know how hard it is to break into the world of publishing. Success is often extremely hard and painful to reach, but with the ever-growing demand for ebooks, we saw an opportunity. We decided, as a group, that we would take our work into our own hands and publish ourselves. November 23rd 2011 saw our first Ebook launch with three new titles gracing the Amazon bookshelves:

'A Stitch In Time' by Willaby
'Justice: Served Cold' by Susan Maylor
and
'Son of Jack' by D R Cartwright

These three titles marked the beginning of something that we hope will turn into a success. And it doesn't end there either. June will see our second Ebook launch, a launch that will introduce new writers to the world of publishing success.

And the blog?

Well, this blog is here so we can share our adventures with you, each sharing individual views on topics about writing, in hopes of encouraging and inspiring other writers out there. The publishing world is a tough one. Why go it alone?