I recieved the most unexpected email today. It was from an editor at Cengage, a publisher of education/text books, asking for permission to reprint one of my essays in a book they were putting together. True, it was a form letter. But still, it was a bit flattering.
The essay is one I have on my professional website discussing the popularity of ebooks (http://creative-vapors.com/essays/will-ebooks-rule/) I wrote the essay over a year ago, and today I would alter what I wrote in the essay, a bit. Then I opined that ebooks would never make physical books extinct, and, further, that ebooks would never become the majority of books sold. I still hold quite strongly to the first point, I now doubt the second point. As the ebook market matures it looks like there will be an increasingly large pool of ebooks priced at 99 cents. I think this will create a high volume of impulse purchases–books bought but never read–that will cause the volume of books sold to eventually tip in favor of ebook readers. I am still not convinced that the majority of people will read the majority of their books on an ereader. But that is a more nuanced view then I presented over a year ago.
I gather it is the sort of educational book where a bunch of opinion essays are gathered together and the student is supposed to exercise reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. So we won’t worry if the essay doesn’t make me look as smart as I would like. I’ll be the guy with the stupid essay in the book.
It feels flattering, but the reality is that someone at this company was probably googling for essays and I simply happened to come up on the topic in question. Random luck, not the great recommendation of my skill and insight as a writer. It probably didn’t hurt that the formatting of the essay looks pretty professional.
Still, this is just a little essay included in a book, so there is no cause for me to be getting any big ideas from this.
But too late–I’m already sure it will be the beginning of my writing career! I can hear The New Yorker calling . . .
