[Writer Post] E-Books and Word Counts
I had an interesting Google Talk conversation with my friend, Meredith, before ApolloCon last week. She sent me a link to this article on word counts. It poses the question, “…will word count be rendered less relevant (or even irrelevant) once the cost of paper gets tossed aside by the new technology?” Though the article poses some interesting points, my OPINION is…no.
There are many factors to consider here… and paper cost is still one of them. You see, I personally don’t think print will ever die. Not completely. Therefore, most e-books will still see some sort of print run – whether it’s POD or a traditional print run. There will still be those who need/want/desire “dead tree” versions. So for those books the traditional word count will still matter.
For completely electronic versions, there will still be word count issues – if you’re going to put fiction (or non-fiction) on a blog or website, it’s been shown that most people don’t stick around past about 500-800 in a single sitting. (It’s an ADD world folks…) So, serialized pieces will need to be reduced to about 1000 word chunks – and unless you expect folks to stick around for HUNDREDS OFINSTALLMENTS and are ready to make that commitment…yeah.
As for “unlimited electronic space…” yeah, that’s fallible too. There’s no such thing as “unlimited”. E-Readers have a capacity. It’s a lot, but at some point it does fill up. For people who travel – or live where paper books are a luxury due to cost – many are going to go for quantity, and e-books (as with paper) will come down to how much space it takes up. Let’s face it, the more people argue about e-book pricing…at some point they’re going to figure out how to price/charge by file size (and they may already be). In fact, I think that may be why digital comic books/graphic novels are slower adopters. Images are bigger than text. And that’s just storage. We haven’t even talked about downloads and bandwidth.
We’re already seeing major corporations trying to put caps on internet usage. Many cable/internet/phone companies have done away with true “unlimited” internet. Not to mention there are still areas that don’t have broadband internet or 3G or any G whatsoever. Those people are not going to spend the time and money to buy a huge electronic book that may have a higher chance of glitching during download.
Those are the logical and technological reasons why I don’t believe we’ll start seeing 300K word Tomes erupting on the e-book scene – or, rather, sustaining themselves on the scene. The other, purely “aesthetic” reason on my part is that 9 times out of 10 a book that big is – frankly – overwritten and with some decent editing could probably be a good, tight read at half the size. That said, this DOES NOT take Omnibus Editions into account – a compilation of a series (which are generally limited editions, special circumstances and something designed to multiple books). There is a market for those kind of things and are a special situation. Nor am I saying a 300K book can’t work – I just don’t think AS A RULE, as a Business Practice they will be “financially viable” in any format. Because let’s face it – a Tome, a huge book, is going to cost MORE no matter what the form or format, and that’s what most of the e-book debate has been about. Money.