Quote:
Originally Posted by Crowl
(scifi & fantasy seem like obvious ones that would be less prone to paper book fetishism than most.)
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I can attest to that.
But going by my mother and her crowd, the romance readers have long been even less attached to the dead tree pulp; she and her circle would swap around entire boxes of books without much concern. Each book was a read and once read its value was in bringing other reads.
ebooks you can't swap around but they are cheaper and more readily available.
The entire romance genre, both readers and authors, rarely gets the respect it deserves as an enormous chunk of publishing. In many circles, getting "caught" reading porn might draw a smirk but nowhere near the ribbing of reading "that trashy stuff".
No single genre can claim the Kindle's success for their own. There are simply too many different reasons for its success and its appeal is too broad for that.
But still...
...Oprah.
We SF fans might have been first onboard the Kindle express (debateable but likely) but the Oprah hordes swooped in and made it a household name. And romance was definitely a factor with that crowd. And if indie publishing is striding to full respectability it is due to the genres in general and romance and SF in particular, in that order.
That Romance community has proven to be very accepting of both ebooks and indie writers.
http://writerunboxed.com/2013/07/24/...lf-publishing/
So much so that at the recent Romance Writers of America conference, for the first time ever, the once so-coveted slots to meet with publisher reps to present proposals and manuscripts went unclaimed. And not just a few but, by most reports, a lot; a massive amount of publisher time was spent listening to chirping crickets.
There is a lot of evidence emerging that the size of many, if not most, of the genres, pre-ebook, were constrained no so much by demand as by under-supply. With no gatekeepers to constrain the supply (and siphon off revenues) the size of many of the genre markets has exploded with readers and authors both benefiting from disintermediation.
The ebook disruption of publishing is far from over and porn is far from the last genre (or sub-genre) that will show surprising (to some) strength at the virtual checkout counter. There really is room for everybody in ebook-land.