simplerich

At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”

via At BookExpo This Year, the Talk Was of eBooks – NYTimes.com. (Emphasis mine)

OK, listen folks… if you’re an author and you want readers one thing you shouldn’t do is trash-talk your readers. The thing is… I’ve never heard of this person and the odds of me having ever read his books were vanishingly small before this incident… now they’re zero.

If you’re in sales, and authors are in sales if they try and make their living selling their books, saying you want to hit a potential customer is stupid. I suspect the elitist accusation that was made is a case of pot & kettle… or outright grandstanding for an attention starved individual looking for some sensationalist press.

Face by the same author is available on kindle, which, if he were to pay attention would be a digital form. It is however not a novel. It’s a book of poetry, as is The Business of Fancydancing, which is also available as a digital download via kindle’s whispernet. So I think there’s some very fine hair-splitting there. Maybe no novels of his on kindle, but the poetry, what that’s OK? One wonders at the consistency of that sort of logic.**

** I typically only link to amazon books I would recommend. I don’t recommend these books at all. I don’t recommend anything by this author who is obviously an attention starved arteest, but I did want to link to the digital editions of his works. If somebody wants to shop from there I’d happily take a buck or two from them, but I’d rather have donations here so I can get me some kindle love!