This winter marks the time when for most book buyers the word book no longer calls up the image of printed sheets of paper bound together. That time is past.  This Christmas day, Amazon, the world’s biggest bookseller sold more eBooks than print books! Print books are now a subcategory in the publishing industry, referred to as p-Books,.

For people like Sarah and I who have written 18 p-books between us, this is time for reminiscing and nostalgia. As a child, I looked admiringly into the Canterbury bookstore window in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and wished someday that I might write a book that would be on the shelves and in the windows of  stores like Canterbury. So for me, this passage is not just a change in packaging, marketing and pricing, it’s the end of an era that began long before I was born.

This new era promises opportunity and hope for some, perhaps many. To get an eBook to readers no longer requires the intermediaries aspiring authors once needed to navigate. There was a saying that you needed to first please your editor and the sales department, then your readers, and last yourself. Now you only need to please your readers first and foremost as well as yourself. But gone, too, is the financial and marketing support these many intermediaries provided.  To be sure, there will be winners and losers in this transformation.  For newer writers, this is the new normal; for established authors like ourselves we all need to adapt.