TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home
News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics
‘Readers: Born or made?’: Is there a recreational reading gene?
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
Has anyone ever studied the recreational reading habits of identical twins raised in different households? Just how much does environment count? Maybe less than we’d think?
Is there a pleasure reading gene or set of them? Or at least an absence of problems, such as the mildest trace of dyslexia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, that would interfere with enjoyment of books?
And on the other side of the coin, might positive genes help keep people distracted from recreational reading? Maybe hand-eye coordination genes that served their owners well in baseball or video-gaming?
Oh, and how to distinguish the pleasure reading gene from the work reading gene, the latter of which might be too highly developed in lawyers?
I’m wondering after having read—for pleasure, not just work—the following in Darrell Bain’s June newsletter:
Best-selling E author Darrell Bain on agent hell and e-book success: 5,000 copies sold in E is proportionally 250,000 in P
Sunday, December 30th, 2007By Darrell Bain
Moderator’s note: Darrell Bain, one of the best-selling authors of the e-book world and winner of two Eppies, is our newest contributor. See his bio at the end. His sci-fi novel Savage Survival is an e-book, trade paperback and hardback. Welcome, Darrell! - David Rothman
Ten years ago, in 1997, my budding hopes of becoming a successful author came crashing down in ruins as I learned that the so-called agent I had been dealing with for six years was an out and out crook.
Not only had all the manuscripts I submitted to the agent not been sent to publishers, I had been talked into paying a large amount for “reading fees,” “expenses” and “publishing contracts.” I paid some money up front for publication and supposedly was to recover it in sales. But the “publishers” were as fraudulent as the agent.
Broken dreams in the world of P—and jail time for the villains
I was naïve, along with thousands of other writers caught in the same web, and for a time I did nothing but brood over the dollars and years the scam had cost me. The agent and her husband and one of the “publishers” went to prison for mail fraud, but even this did little to assuage my feelings as I thought of all the lies I had believed in my eagerness to reach print.
Eventually, I picked up my broken dreams and went on with my life. I had felt the closeness of becoming published, even if it had been a fraud, and I couldn’t stop trying. But where to turn? At the time I still thought that all of my eight novels had been submitted to real publishers, so I didn’t try them “again.” Where should I next turn? Not any time soon would I trust another agent.
Breaking into E
What happened over the next five years surprised me beyond anything I might have reasonably expected. You see, I knew nothing about e-books at the time.
