Kindle users, be ready! John Grisham’s books are coming to your ebook readers.
A vocal skeptic of ebooks, John Grisham has finally allowed his numerous best-sellers to go electronic. Random House announced that 23 of the author’s backlist titles will be available anywhere ebooks are sold. Amazon wasted no time in offering ebooks from Grisham, and you can get titles from “The Firm” to “Ford County” from the popular author who was a lawyer and politician prior to his book-writing career. Grisham’s titles range from $5.99 and $9.99 at Amazon.
Random House of course expressed their excitement about the author finally allowing his books to enter the ebook world.
Sonny Mehtha, editor in chief of Random House division Knopf Doubleday said, “This is one of our most exciting e-book initiatives to date and is certain to usher in a new generation of Grisham readers and e-book adopters.”
Random House has not given any details on the deal with Grisham, and Grisham didn’t release a statement about the announcement that was made on Tuesday, March 17th.
The surprise comes from the fact that Grisham has expressed his dislike of ebooks in a Today Show interview. Last October, Grisham’s “Ford County,” a short story collection was once of the books involved in the ecommerce price war. This war involved retailer giants, Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target. Grisham disagreed with the heavy discounting which knocked “Ford County” down to 9 bucks.
In that same interview with the Today Show, Grisham said, “The uncertainty comes with the e-market. Five years from now, how many of us are going to be reading books on Kindles and all these Sony readers, these beautiful gadgets and devices, that are going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper? If half of us are going to be doing it, then you’re going to be wiping out tons of bookstores and publishers and we’ll buy it all online.”
In his Today Show interview, Grisham also said, “If a new book is now worth about $9 then we have seriously devalued that book.”
Is this technology devaluing books? We are obviously still spending. According to statistics released by International Digital Publishing Forum, wholesale revenue from ebook sales in the United States went from $16.6 million in 2008 to $55.9 million in 2009. It seems that with the rising popularity of devices like the Kindle, Mr. Grisham’s bank account is going to be okay.