SF/F e-books break old ground. Oh Dear.

E-books, long speculated to be a Colt-45 Equalizer for the trembling palms of new authors, turns out to be just more of the same old same old.

There's been an interesting yet pungent whiff of SF news floating out of the universe of e-books ... those electronic downloadable novel doo-dahds which were being toted as paper book-killers in the boom times of dot.com madness.

It's kind of a major good news : bad news thing, as far as us crusty old types at the Nest can see.

The good news is that the amount of e-books (claimed) to have been sold has been rising by fairly healthy amounts in the last 12 months. For instance, Palm Digital Media, the e-book arm of the manufacturers of the PalmPilot PDA, recently claimed to have sold 180,000 ebooks in 2001.

Not bad, you think. Even better news was that science fiction and fantasy (with the odd splash of horror, courtesy of Stephen King), totally dominated the Palm charts. About the only thing selling as well was porn and all the manuals of erotica being touted in the non-fiction section of the charts. Apparently the The Vagina Monologues was Palm's number 10 best-seller. Ho hum.

Surprising? Perhaps not. The owners of PDAs have long-been characterized as geeks by the mass media. And us geeks - as you no doubt know - do love our dear old fix of SF and F every now and then. In between our porn, at least.

However, if you dig a little bit beneath the news, it all gets a lot more depressing.

After all, e-books were sold as a way for new science fiction and fantasy novelists to break the monopoly of distribution held by the big publishing houses and flood the market with hundred of undiscovered gems.

Twas not to be, though. Robot Dreams, by Isaac Asimov (famous. dead), topped the charts at major player Fictionwise as their best-selling e-book of 2001.

Larry Niven - famous, alive - came in at number two slot. Mike Resnick - famous, already published, and yes, to the best our our knowledge also on this mortal coil - filled in five more positions.

Other complete unknown new authors broken by FictionWise included Robert Silverberg, as well as brilliant undiscovered talent Nancy Kress.

Yes, it seems the main criteria to have a best-selling e-book is to be a famous (wo)man of letters in the world of dead-trees.

That would be the same world dominated by lazy agents, stupid publishing houses, massive marketing budgets, large books chains and slush piles of infinite size then?

Good news for SF/F accountants. Not so good news for struggling SF/F authors seeking somewhere to publish their work.

Of course, to put e-book sales in perspective, the 180,000 copies that Palm shifted is about equivalent to two month's unit sales in the Borders Super-Store on Oxford Street.

I downloaded that Interzone magazine in the back of my cab once.

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SF/F e-books break old ground. Oh Dear.
E-books, long speculated to be a Colt-45 Equalizer for the trembling palms of new authors, turns out to be just more of the same old same old. (COMMENT)

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