This is the latest in a series of Meaty Monday posts – longer posts where I ramble on about writing related topics. You can find the first Meaty Monday post here.

Authors are almost legally required to hate ebooks. After all, those cold, soulless packages of bits and bytes can’t compare with the tactile and olfactory delights a real book provides. In a lot of ways that’s true and as my heavily overloaded shelves will attest, I’ve always had great difficultly resisting the lure of the bookshop. In fact, until a couple of years ago ebooks held no interest for me at all but then I bought my wife a Kobo reader for her birthday and then I borrowed it to read William Gibson’s Zero History.

I was hooked.

Sure, the first generation Kobo reader is slow and doesn’t have wireless or any other bells and whistles but it was so convenient and – for some unknown reason – fun.

I quickly bought myself a Kindle and I’ve never looked back. I do still buy physical books, usually Subterranean Press or Cemetery Dance limited editions, or books by my favourite authors (Caitlin R Kiernan, Haruki Murakami etc.) but generally I choose the digital version if I can. The biggest advantage of doing that of course is that I can buy as many books as I like without taking up any more space in our apartment.

And buy I have.

I now have well over two hundred ebooks, most of which I would never have bought if I’d needed to dedicate shelf space to them. The insubstantial nature of ebooks has released me from any guilt I might feel about cluttering up my home and unleashed a ravenous book buying fiend. I’m buying books 4-5x quicker than I read them – a habit that has followed me from the physical bookshops I might add.

Not only am I buying more books, I’m reading more too. The convenience and simplicity of having so many books at my fingertips has reignited my love of reading and the ease with which I can buy the next book in a series or try out a new author at exactly the point where I’m about to start a new book makes it easier to keep up my momentum.

Of course, some of this is because of the profusion of very cheap ebooks – I’m a sucker for 99c sales – but a couple of days ago, for the first time, I paid more for an ebook than the equivalent paperback – Dan Wells’ I am Not a Serial Killer.

There’s a general expectation that digital products cost less than their physical counterparts. In part, that expectation is driven by the downward pressure on ebook prices being created by the army of self-publishers taking advantage of the digital revolution to try to hook readers with a cheap taster of their work in the hope it will prompt them to buy the next few books at a more realistic price.

The other factor in this sense of fiscal entitlement digital readers feel is purely a matter of economics – it has to be cheaper to make these virtual products. After all, there’s no manufacturing, no shipping, no warehousing. That saves the publishers money and surely, all those savings should be passed on to the reader.

There’s a fundamental flaw with that thinking.

Yes, ebooks don’t have those physical costs associated with them so yes, they are marginally cheaper to create than their physical counterparts but that’s not what you’re paying for when you buy a book. You’re not paying for the paper they’re printed on, the ink or the trucks used to get them across the country and into your hands. You’re not even paying for the professional editing or the other work the publisher does on behalf of the author.

You’re paying for the story. You’re paying for the unique combination of creativity, talent and craftmanship the author used arrange those specific words into that specific order to create a world you’ll immerse yourself in for hours and, with luck, remember for the rest of your life. The fact that you’re experiencing that world via a virtual product rather than a physical one makes no difference. The pleasure you get from a book will be the same, however it’s delivered.

The combination of extreme price competition and readers expectations are rapidly driving down the price of eBooks. On the surface that sounds like a good thing but in reality, if this kind of aggressive price war continues it’s the reader that will lose out. “Writer” is already a precarious choice of occupation and it’s tough for anyone to earn a living writing free books. Of course, there’ll be a stream of new writers coming on the scene who will be prepared to follow the drug dealer business model and give away a few hits to build that fan base but they’ll struggle to build a professional career if they can’t earn a professional income and they’ll soon be forced to move on to more lucrative employment – working in a bookstore perhaps. The end result will be less professional writers and a dearth of new, high quality, fiction.

The rise of ebooks seems inevitable. I can foresee a world where most fiction is only available as an ebook and the kind of luscious limited editions created by Subterranean Press and Cemetery Dance. That does make me a little sad but I still hold out hope that the convenience and accessibility of so many stories will inspire future generations to devour those books just as it has me. I just hope the true worth of those stories isn’t lost along the way.

After all, the value of a great book comes from its story, not the dead tree you hold in your hands.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Brains is now available on Kindle. In it you’ll find my story – The Z Word – plus fifty other tales of the undead.

Here’s the full table of contents:

Remembering Human – Bint Arab
Necropolis Burning – Robert Forrester
Blissfully Ignorant – Michael C. Dick
An Undead Night to Remember – K. A. Masters
Quality of Life – T. Fox Dunham
Remember Me – Kenneth E. Olson
Undead Surveillance – Jason Papke
Oh, the Dreadful Wind & Rain – Richard Jay Goldstein
The Secret to Survival – T. L. Barrett
Mikey – Theresa Derwin
The Beginning of the End – Jack Bantry
Old Louisville – Bruce L. Priddy
The Return of Dale Corby – Jonathan Wood
For Audrey – Nicky Peacock
The Army of Al-Din – Douglas Moore
Zombies are Dead – Iain Rob Wright
Fractions – Dale Elster
Complete Ignorance – Michael C. Dick
Diary of Gerhard Koblenz – Trevor Smith
The Z Word – Philip Harris
A Quiet Night, a Perfect End – Annie Neugebauer
The Day Danny McAllister Decided to be a Hero – Matt Nord
Dry Rot – Jamal K. Luckett
The Food of Love – Marc-Anthony Taylor
Behind Glass – Michelle Ann King
Zombies Were People – Suzanne Robb
Springfield – C. Douglas Birkhead
Stir-Fired Cerebrum – Anne E. Johnson
Autopsy This! – Indy McDaniel
Blood is Thicker Than… – Bryan Vogt
Deadweed Day – Paul S. Huggins
Destiny’s Secret – Stef White
Fur, Claws and Zombies – Iain Rob Wright
The Screaming Dead – J. Rodimus Fowler
My Child Lives – Golda Mowe
She’s Waiting – Mihai Boc
Unusual Appetites – Jessica A. Weiss
Folks Like Us – B. E. Scully
Rory Thompson Calls him the Gunslinger – Jack Bantry
Play by Play – Scott Lininger
Not Death, but Dying – Katie Young
Waiting for Gordon – Allen Jacoby
Mary – S. Wayne Roberts
Seven Eight One Five Four – Alyn Day
Goodnight, Sweet Revenant – R. S. Pyne
In the End, We are Like our Fathers – T. L. Berrett
For the Cure – Kristal Stittle
Priorities, Priorities – Theresa Derwin
Live, and Let Them be Undead – Pembroke Sinclair
Planes, Strains and Runaway Meals – Justin Sharples
The Unzoetic Zombies of Oz – Vince Liberato
Teaser Chapters from the Collaboration of the Dead novel
Chapter 1 – Matt Nord
Chapter 2 – Todd Brown
Chpater 3 – GNBraun
Chapter 4 – Zombie Zak
Chapter 5 – Stephanie Kincaid

As you can see that’s a lot of Zombies, over 470 pages worth in fact, and you also get the first five chapters from the Collaboration of the Dead novel.

I’ve recently signed up to the Daily Science Fiction mailing list. As the name suggests, they email a new science fiction story to subscribers every weekday. Most days the stories are short (less than 1000 words) but Friday’s story is longer. Stories are also posted and archived on the website a week after their email publication and published as a monthly ebook anthology.

Obviously, with so many stories nobody is going to love all of them but the short length makes them very easy to read. I’ve made the daily email one of my daily rituals and I look forward to seeing a new tale in my inbox every morning. Highlights for me over the last couple of weeks have been Butterfly Shaped Objects by George Potter, A Stitch in Space-time by Nicky Drayden and Gifted and Talented by Sadie Mattox.

Well worth a look, there’s a wide variety of science fiction there so you’ll probably find something you like.

If you’re a horror fan you may have come across One Buck Horror in your travels. It’s a series of ebooks, each one featuring five new horror stories. I picked up volume four over the holidays and enjoyed it – well worth the 99c it cost.

The good news is that Volume One is on offer at the moment – for $0. You can get it on Amazon or SmashWords.

Our new Kobo Vox arrived yesterday.

I resisted the eBook revolution for a long time but Ann persuaded me to buy her one for her birthday last year. I borrowed it to read William Gibson’s Zero History and was immediately hooked. She has her first generation Kobo, I have a 3rd generation Kindle. I see the Kindle as the Rolls Royce of ereaders, high quality and until recently, a bit expensive. The Kobo is nice, very light, although the first generation is a bit slow to start up, particularly compared to my Kindle. Maybe the newer ones have improved, I don’t know.

Even though I have an ereader, I still buy physical books. I love the look and feel and smell of real printed books and I’ve spent over $400 on them over the last 3-4 weeks* but the ereaders have rekindled (do you see what I did there?) my love of reading. I’m reading a lot more books since I got my Kindle and I’m reading more broadly. In particular I’m picking up random self-published books by authors I’ve never heard of. Some of them I enjoy, some of them I don’t but either way I’m discovering authors that I never would have found otherwise. I’m also building a growing collection of unread ebooks – it’s just too easy to buy them – but we won’t talk about that. I am uneasy about Amazon’s proprietary format and their dominance of the market, but that’s a topic for another day perhaps.

The Vox is basically a 7″ Android tablet that places the Kobo reading app front and center. Setup was fairly quick, although there’s already a firmware update even though the device came out less than a week ago. Once it was set up we left it downloading the few dozen books Ann has bought over the last eighteen months. That took a while over my newly “upgraded” Internet connection so we didn’t get to try it out properly but first impressions are good, although it seems a lot heavier than the original Kobo and of course the battery life on a tablet is far shorter than a dedicated ereader.

There was also writing yesterday – 523 words on Rainshine and I’m a lot happier with the story than I was. Still hoping to finish it over the weekend but other obligations are starting to mount up.

* Results not typical.