HOSTILITY TO E-BOOKS (excerpt from Digital Inc.)

The Biggest Obstacles to the E-Book Revolution Were Authors and Agents

Many agencies were old, thirty or forty years old or more. If not lost or misfiled, their innumerable contracts, amendments and correspondence were squashed into filing cabinets, the paper yellow and brittle and photocopies almost illegibly faded. For a busy agent to pore over them one at a time, deciphering their suitability for this new medium when no one was sure what this medium was or when if ever it would become relevant or profitable – life was too short! Many publishing people considered digital books to be a flash-in-the-pan novelty at the very least and a threat to their beloved Gutenberg mindset at worst. Some hated the idea so passionately that they refused to have anything to do with digital books, an animosity that endured well into the 21^st century.

Bizarrely – for you would think they would welcome a potential new source of income and readership - this aversion extended to authors, for whom the only kind of book was a printed volume (what publishing people smilingly call “book-books”). Even science fiction writers dedicated to imagining future worlds had a hard time imagining the one being born in front of their eyes. My fantasist client Harlan Ellison, never one to mince words, brandished a copy of one of his hardcovers and flatly declared “This is a book. That…” (jabbing his forefinger at my computer monitor) “…is bullshit.”

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Excerpt from Digital Inc., Inside the Transformation of the Book Industry from Print to E-Books