The BBC reports on Glaswegian crime author Denise Mina, whose novel The End of the Wasp Season recently won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, expressing her feelings about e-books. And unlike some writers, she doesn’t feel threatened by them—indeed, she thinks that they are in the process of revolutionizing publishing.
Calling e-publishing “a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the world,” Mina feels that it will change things previously taken for granted in print publishing, such as book length or the practice of having cliffhangers at the end of every chapter. She also stated they will make it easier for people to be published:
“There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one. I think it’s going to change who writes, what they write, the sorts of stories we hear.
“I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.”
All this stuff is, of course, old hat to people who’ve been following e-books and the prognostication surrounding them for a while. But it’s nice to see an award-winning author speaking out about it, and a major news site reporting it as news.
