New life for an old book

Yesterday, I downloaded Lost in the Ivy to my iPhone. I paid Amazon.com $9.99 for the right to download by own book. It’s a steep price to pay to read a book that you wrote, but it’s kind of cool that now when someone asks me what I’ve written, all I have to do is pull my iPhone out of my pocket and show it to them.

Six years after my book was released as a paperback, it has been given a new life as an electronic book, available now through Amazon’s Kindle store and for an extra $4.72 through Google’s eBookstore. Why Google is charging more for air than Kindle is I have no idea. The ebook landscape is still being charted and no one can be sure where it’s going, but I’d be stunned if the prices for ebooks don’t drop dramatically as they increasingly gain a stronger foothold on the market.

Ebooks give old books a new lease on life, and that’s a step in the right direction. All they have to do to take a giant leap forward and make that new life one worth living is to take a lesson from the music industry and do the right thing: drop the price.