Thursday, July 7, 2011

Electrons for Sale! Get Yer Electrons, Right Here!

Big publishing news, at least to me: Mom's Cancer is now available for the Kindle, with other e-book platforms to follow very soon! Within a week or two I should be able to direct you to similar offerings for the Nook, Nook Color and Sony Reader, with Apple's iBookstore to follow later this summer.

This has been in the works for a while and I'm very excited about it. I'm interested to see how my book works in electronic format--which may prove difficult since I don't actually own any of those readers. But my artwork is clean and open enough, and my lettering large and legible enough, that I'd expect Mom's Cancer to look pretty sharp.

I'm especially gratified that my publisher Abrams went to the effort. Mom's Cancer was published almost exactly five years ago (that's so hard for me to believe that I checked the math twice) and is now a backlist book that wouldn't ordinarily get a new lease on life. It's nice to see that Editor Charlie and his bosses still have some confidence in it.

We've also had some conversations about what could come next for Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, including softcover (not this year for sure, but maybe next) and e-book editions. The latter would be an interesting challenge, since we went to a lot of trouble to use different paper stock and such that wouldn't translate to the screen. Simply digitizing the existing layouts wouldn't work. I've already told Editor Charlie and Abrams's e-book person that when the time comes, I want to work closely with them to get that right.

Pretty cool, eh? Some days I like living in the Future.

UPDATE: As of this morning, it's available for the Nook as well!
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5 comments:

sligo said...

YES!

Jim O'Kane said...

I think the act of reading Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? in e-book format would be so meta the world would implode.

Brian Fies said...

Seriously. LOOK! It's the World of Tomorrow INSIDE the World of Tomorrow! YOU'RE HOLDING IT IN YOUR HANDS RIGHT NOW!! Ka-boom.

Sligo, thanks. You and I have talked about this before and I never had anything to say until now.

Sherwood Harrington said...

For me, one of the many joys of Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow is tactile: the contrasting textures of the different types of paper. That wouldn't work in e-book form, of course, nor would the nifty cover/dust jacket duet.

ronnie said...

I agree with Sherwood that some of the experience would be lost by reading WHTTWOT in ebook format... but still, this introduces Mom's Cancer (and possibly in future WHTTWOT) to entirely new audiences who might not otherwise have found it. Great development!