It’s Raining eBooks

cc licensed flickr photo shared by JanneM

You can barely spit anymore and not hit a blog or twitter message with someone announcing their new eBook.

My hats are off to people who go down that long road of writing- it definitely takes a lot to write something in long form; I by no means am saying we don’t need more ideas written.

Do we need so much of it in eBook format?

I am thinking about a list of half/unread eBooks lurking in my kindle app now… unlike the ones sitting on my bookshelf, there is no real reminder of my half read efforts. I cannot help but wonder if so many eBooks being put out in the stream might go undigested, barely read.

More than that- what exactly does one gain by publishing their work in eBook format, besides riding some carpet tails of the device fad. Can I hyperlink from your eBook? Can I easily copy a snippet and share with a colleague? Can I find it by googling? Is it full of rich media? What content is going to fall into some un-indexable places because it is wedged inside an eBook? What is really new about a text in eBook form- it feels very incremental.

It just seems to me that we’ve had since Sir Tim devised HTML, a very simple way to produce electronic texts that are versatile, work on many platforms, etc.

So my new eBook will be out in a few months on the subject why web text is better than eBooks.

Not.

The It’s Raining eBooks by CogDogBlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.