Failed Experiment

A few years ago Amazon.com came up with what I thought was a really cool project:

Amazon Shorts.

They would publish short stories in electronic format and customers could buy them and download them to their email and read them at leisure. So I submitted a few stories and had a couple accepted into the program. Payments were to be made quarterly whenever the royalties reached $10 or more.

Alas, the project failed utterly.

There were way too many glitches in the whole deal for it to have ever worked as promised. From what I've gathered from talking with other writers, very few authors were ever paid anything at all. And keeping track of the program apparently cost Amazon more than it brought in. So they stopped soliciting new material.

Since I had other ideas in mind for the fiction I had there, and since they seemed to be merely taking up space on Amazon, I requested that they be taken down. In quick and polite order the folk at Amazon did as I requested and killt the online yarns. Alas, it seemed like a good idea, but it just didn't work out.

A lot of writers I know are very keen on the whole e-book subject. They tell me that it's the wave of the future. They tell me that they're making money with it. I don't really believe either of those statements, and I can say with no trouble at all that I don't care for e-books and it's my general feeling that I'll never buy one. Yeah, I know--never say never. But I just can't see myself buying a Kindle or an Apple Ipod or anything of that nature and reading my books that way. Give me a paperback or a hardback with pages made of real paper. I have bookshelves. I love my books and
I just don't want any freaking digital fiction.

So there. Take that, computer nerds!

I want my e-books now.