Bookofjoe has reported on a story coming out of India. Mountblanc issues limited edition fountain pens on a regular basis. Some of them are quite beautiful, and some are really hideously ugly. They have done a whole writers’ series including Agatha Christie, Virginia Wolf, Voltaire and more.
Not a writer, but one of the world’s great statesmen, Mountblanc has just misunderstood his entire ethos and issued a $23,000 pen commemorating austere, ascetic Mahatma Gandhi! Bookofjoe reports that Amit Modi, secretary of the 102-year-old Sabarmati Ashram that Gandhi founded to promote his ideas of radical egalitarianism and simple living, expressed dismay at the product, which he called “not relevant” to Gandhi’s name. “If he had seen this, he would have thrown it away,” Mr Modi said. “I cannot imagine why anybody has done this. We cannot recognize this.”
Talk about misreading the consumer! Does this look familiar in the ebook arena? Publishers are continually misreading their public. People want reasonably priced, non-DRMed ebooks that can be read on more than one platform. For those who want ebooks, I strongly suspect that they will not buy the hard cover version when an ebook version is not available. That means no sale at all for the publisher. Pity.
I guarantee I won’t buy a hardcover, actually. 🙂
Not a pity in the longer term though, as if they fail to provide then sales decline, if that happens, maybe the companies will fail – and be replaced by something better afterwards.
So if they don’t provide what you are interested in, don’t give them any money at all.
Although I guess if you really want to read it, buy it from a secondhand place cheap sometime! 🙂
At this point, I’m more likely to buy, not a hardcover but a paperback, than a drm’d ebook. I am not buying any more drm’d ebooks. The paperback will probably cost about the same, and it will belong to me.
After I read ebook on my Pocket Edition reader for the first time, I can’t see myself going back to the hard-cover. For me, the ebook is so much easier to handle in bed than hard-cover — it is lighter, smaller, and turning pages is much easier. Plus, I can adjust the text size to suit me.
I know I will not be buying hard-cover books and most likely will not buy trade paperbacks either.