Monday, March 22, 2010

John Grisham reluctantly embraces eBooks

Author, John Grisham, has broken his holdout against selling his books in an electronic format and will sell all of his 23 titles as e-books, his publisher said on Tuesday. The former lawyer, whose best sellers include "The Firm" and "A Time To Kill", had previously held off selling his books electronically, expressing concern that e-books would wipe out traditional book stores and make it harder for new writers to succeed.

Grisham had previously said in a TV interview last November that discounting of printed books by major retailers and the advent of e-books was "a disaster in the long term" for publishers, bookstores and authors.

"If a new book is now worth about $9 then we have seriously devalued that book," Grisham said on the "Today" show.

"Suddenly the whole industry is going to change, you are going to lose publishers, you are going to lose bookstores. I am probably going to be alright, but the aspiring writers are going to have a hard time getting published," he added.

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