Ebooks are forever

Ebooks are forever. Think about this sentence for a moment. You write a novel, get it formatted, have a nice cover made up, get an ISBN, and then download it onto Kindle, or Smashwords, or any of the hundreds of ebook distributors, and poof, it’s available globally to anyone with an ereader. Not only that, it will be available until the end of time. That means fifty years from now if I want to show my great grandchild one of my books, all they’ll have to do is type in the title and, poof again, there it will be.

Talk about immortalizing yourself for all eternity. Isn’t that what art is all about? I’m very lucky to be living in an age where I can imprint myself to the world and be remembered forever through my books. I do feel sad for all the paperback writers throughout the last centuries whose hard work and effort only got them a six-week shelf life for their masterpiece and then their book would disappear forever, going out of print and into the paper shredder. With ebooks I may still be getting royalties when I’m a hundred years old, I can write and publish what I want and let the worldwide public decide if the book is good, without being evaluated for the amount of profit the story might generate.

My novels won’t sit stacked on some shelf in the back of a dusty old bookstore (if bookstores still exist in five years). They will always be fresh and ready for download, ready to draw a new reader into my crazy, noir, eccentric, imaginary worlds. It’s an incredibly comforting thought knowing my stories will be around forever, like the myths of ancient Greece or fables and folklore of olden times. In a way, ebooks will immortalize me and define me as a novelist until the end of time. Now, if I could just make a healthy living at it. Haha.

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