I came across this news release today. Stephanie Meyer, the author of the Twilight Series announced that she is releasing her new Twilight novella online, in a “read-only” format, one day after the book comes out in stores. “Stephanie told fans that they had already bought a “ton” of her books and she wanted to give them back something for free” (Mirror).
In an earlier post I talked about how authors were using the Kindle to pre-publish their novels as a way to get feedback. However, Meyers use of the Internet to publish is different. Meyer is adopting the Creative Commons approach toward the spread of her work. Sort of a – buy it if you can, enjoy it online if you can’t.
I haven’t read any of the Twilight novels, so I wasn’t immediately excited about this, but I started thinking about new publishing mediums for novels. I think I need to try out the iPad to see if it is easier to read text for long periods of time. I really hate reading long articles on the computer screen and if there is any technology I would love to have it would be a “reading” friendly computer screen so that I wouldn’t have to hunch over with glasses squinting at my screen. I also feel some attachment to holding a book, the smell of books, the look of covers. I guess I am just still very skeptical of e-books at this point and am trying to think through the actual reasons why.