We’re having a special Valentine’s giveaway over on the Here Be Magic blog over the next few days. Your chance to win that most special treat for any reader: gift cards to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. (Winner’s choice.) All you have to do is comment.
The Here Be Magic group is interesting. It’s the group blog for all the Carina Press fantasy authors, with “fantasy” being loosely defined. Carina has been doing a great job of acquiring and publishing some terrific science fiction, urban fantasy, paranormal and fantasy, with and without romantic elements.
Interestingly, however, the word is that the community of sci fi and fantasy readers have been slow to adopt eBooks. This seems counter-intuitive to all of us, because those readers, I would think, would be into computers and gadgets and tech. But not for books, apparently. So we’ve been thinking of ways to reach the paper-book readers and entice them with a digital book. Any ideas are welcome.
Have a lovely weekend everyone!
I read Fantasty, UF, SciFi, Mystery, etc., etc. & I lurv my kindle.
I still love “tree-books” but well, the kindle is so cheap & easy, and I’ve got many, many choices of what to read every time I pick it up.
I’m surprised to hear Fantasy/Scifi folks are slow to pick it up.
Put in a secret code to Starbucks or bookstore freebies, only found in the e books. Don’t openly advertise it, start a whisper campaign. Or, instead of freebies, you could qr code to a scavenge hunt pertinent to the book/world. Give the winner a Secret Decoder Ring.
That’s all I got after one vup of coffee. um, Cup. Cup of … oh, never mind.
Those are great ideas, though, John! I confess I love my Kindle, too. SO easy! And GREEN!
I will confess I love print books more than e-books, but there are also some other things that keep me from buying e-books:
-most buy links refer to Amazon or Barns&Nobles and those have formats that my e-reader can’t read. And if a site does have the right format most of the time they want payment by creditcard.
So I always have to search for online stores that
1) have the right format and
2) have PayPal as a payment option.
I’d probably buy more e-books if I could find the right stores more easily (not sure if this is any help for you, except that Carina Press could add a PayPal buy option)
Then there’s the covers: most e-book covers are ugly imo. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but guesswhat: I do!
That’s such great feedback, Carien. I’m going to mention that to Angela James!
How interesting. I had no idea the “techies and geeks” are running a bit behind the curve with regard to ebooks.
I’m very much a physical-book person, and when I got married I had the beginning of an awesome personal library. Unfortunately, my new husband was :not as enamored with books as I am and the first time we moved, 4/5ths of my books were donated to the local library. Since then, wherever we’ve lived, I’ve haunted the library on a regular basis.
This past December, I won a Kindel Fire in a blog contest and spent days trawling through Amazon picking up free books: old editions of classics, poetry, 19th and early 20th century books on etiquette and biography; even the occasional recent.novel that is free for a limited
Time.
So now I have my longed-for big personal library, and it fits neatly into my purse. It’s not quite the same as sitting in a room that is stuffed foor-to-ceiling with physical books, but at least I won’t have to pay 100s of dollars to have them shipped if we ever move again, or, even worse, have to leave them behind.
This is exactly what happened to me, Suzanne. We recently moved and most of the moving truck was boxes of books. SO much easier to have the library be electronic. And more room for art on the walls!