Early report on Gary's Kindle Fire: "I like it."

If Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet end up being the Christmas gift everybody gets this year, 2012 will be an amazing year for ebooks. I'm seeing a prodigious blast of ebook consumption coming, and I think people will be very surprised at the books that emerge as big sellers.

Based on my Margaret Mead observation of the Gare Bear since the moment he got hold of his new Kindle Fire, it looks like price point is a major influence on buying. The first thing he did was search on his favorite authors and was seriously dismayed that their ebooks (obviously from the big publishers) were almost as much - in some cases more than - what he's been trained to pay for paperbacks.


So the next thing is visibility. How to authors aiming for the same demographic as that arguably overpriced big name get their book into the reader's eyeballs? Theories continue to evolve.

All we know for certain is that ebooks are not the next Big Thing. They're the current Big Thing. My new novel, The Hurricane Lover, came out on Kindle and Nook this weekend. So begins my indie pub maiden voyage, and I could not be more thrilled about what lies ahead.