• Small press month
• Women’s history month
• National Nutrition Month
• National Kidney Month
• American Red Cross Month.

See anything interesting yet? Maybe you’re not up to a whole month of anything, so consider this: it’s Read an ebook week! Yes, those annoying tree-huggers are back, admonishing you for still reading paper books! I’ll admit to reading both, although I prefer the “e” variety and have for many years. Do I have a dedicated ereader? Yes, and no. My ereader is the granddaddy of all ebook reading devices, the Rocket eBook, and it’s like 8 years old already. Heavy, clunky, but adorable.

On Monday, I noticed the woman on the next treadmill was jogging while reading a Kindle, placed on the magazine deck of her machine. She had to reach up every few seconds to press the spot that would turn the page as she ran. Very jazzy. Poor me, trying to read about Johnny Depp in Entertainment Weekly, while the overhead fan kept blowing the magazine’s leaves. Hrmph.

To celebrate REBW, my niece and I went to B & N yesterday and she scraped up $280 in cold, hard-earned cash (she’s 18) for a nook™ ereader. (Yes, it’s lower case. Go figure.) We were both so excited and spent quite a while playing with it later. While I am enamored with the upcoming Apple iPad, I am so not enamored with the $500+ price tag. So I’m going to wait a bit, get the feedback from my niece on the nook and see if I get a chance to test drive the iPad when it comes out. In the meantime, I’ll play with her nook. Say, look what she’s reading!

POINT SURRENDER is available for your nook, your Kindle, your Sony reader and even your Rocket eBook. Read it on your computer, your iPhone, your MACBook. Your Pocket PC, your Blackberry, your Palm Pilot. And even (shhh! – don’t tell everyone) available in dead-tree version! (On sale at B&N.com for $11.69!)

Happy Reading!

Yes, my book is on Kindle

Lit Agent Nathan Bransford’s post this morning got me thinking. (Note: I still like Nathan even though he turned down my query in a NY minute.) Nathan’s a smart guy, and if anyone is keeping his finger on the pulse of the pub industry, he is. Today he is talking about the squabble over releasing hard cover books in advance of ebooks, because the fear seems to be that the less expensive electronic editions will hurt sales of paper versions. This is particularly amusing to me, because my small press publisher does just the opposite; ebooks first, paper books only if the e-version does well.

I was glad to see that, for the most part, Nathan and I are on the same proverbial page. I see book purchasing consumers as two very different breeds, at least for the time being. The ebook market is still in the throes of a painfully slow evolution. True, the advent of the Kindle and Sony readers has given the process a good shove, but I still believe that the same people who want those hard backs (I never buy them, myself) aren’t the same folks who will gleefully download the same book instead simply due to cost. Save for a small percentage of enlightened mainstream book buyers, most of those clamoring for ebooks would not likely buy the expensive paper version to begin with. Likewise, paper-only-pundits wouldn’t be caught dead with a USB cable in hand.

What I see are missed opportunities for publishers to mine both camps. Maybe part of the problem is that these big, mainstream publishers don’t really know how to market the digital versions of their new releases. Or, they are so focused on the low price of the ebook, they fail to see how any sale is better than no sale.

I’m no expert–although I’d like to be–and I’m still trying to figure out how best to promote ebooks myself. I see my own readers as divided. Clearly, for me, most of my fan base prefers the trade paperback–and I’ve been touting ebooks for ten years. But I can be patient. Ebooks have come farther in the last year than in the previous five, in my opinion. And I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times before: paper books will not go away; there will be, however, a shift in reading toward their electronic cousins. A market share for both.