Is 2010 the year of the ebook in crime fiction?

Is 2010 the tipping point for ebooks? If a look at recent movements in crime fiction are any indication, that appears likely.

Let me qualify “tipping point.” It’s not as if crime fiction fans will sweep all of their musty paperbacks and cherished first-edition hardbacks off of the shelves and replace them with a well-stocked Kindle. It does mean, however, that the e-reader of choice will become a viable option (and at times, the only option) for reading their favorite work.

I haven’t bought a Kindle, nor do I expect to any time soon. I love books — the tactile experience of reading — and see ebooks as a vastly inferior alternative. But, I’m also a Lawrence Block completist, so when I learned that he has assembled a Kindle-only collection of the introductions he has written for various books over the years, I sought out a way to read it. I found the solution in Amazon’s Kindle app, which allows me to download books and read them on my computer and smartphone. That’s not ideal, but it works in the limited instances where it is required. I also picked up the reprint (is there a better term for the electronic version of this?) of Block’s early novel, Campus Tramp. That will be out on paper eventually, but I wasn’t willing to wait.

Then came word in recent weeks that favorites Marcus Sakey and Allan Guthrie were issuing ebook-only books. For Sakey’s, it was the short story collection, Scar Tissue: Seven Stories of Love and Wounds. Guthrie’s is the novella, Bye Bye Baby. Each had their own reason for going the ebook route.

“Ebooks are a perfect choice for this kind of project,” Sakey told me. “Traditional publishers aren’t terribly interested in short story anthologies, which means that shorts tend to vanish pretty quickly.  Obviously I wouldn’t complain if Scar Tissue sold a million copies, but the real reason I put it out there was because I wanted the stories to have more life.  I’m fond of these seven, and it makes me happy to know people are able to read them.”

In Guthrie’s case, it was a matter of timing. “The print version is scheduled to be published in 2013 by Barrington Stoke,” he told me. “The audio rights have also sold. I just didn’t want to wait until 2013 to get the book out, hence the decision to make it available myself as an ebook.”

Both are well worth picking up (particularly at the bargain price of $2.99), and offer a nice appetizer before the next full-scale hardback novels for each. In Sakey’s case, Scar Tissue collects seven of the dozens of stories that the author is happy with. “It’s mostly a feeling that they’ve come alive,” he told me. “There’s a sort of squirmy vitality to a short that’s working.” Bye Bye Baby, meanwhile, shows for the first time what Guthrie can do with a police procedural, putting him on the other side of the law for just the second time in his career (the first being last year’s visceral rush, Slammer).

It has been strange reading these works on the computer screen (and even stranger doing so a few words at a time on the phone), but what I’ve come to realize is that it is the words themselves, not the format in which they are presented, that is most important. Would I rather have these in printed form? Of course. Am I willing to print out and schlep around PDFs to make that happen (which is an option with both)? Nope. So, I do what I must, because I want to read these stories.

For Block, ebooks offer a way for the author to bring back to life the dozens of books he cranked out early in his career, often under pen names, and keep in print his later books that seem to go in and out of print every few years. Campus Tramp was the first such reveal, with others sure to follow. “I’ve been hugely impressed with the medium for 15 years now,” Block writes of ebooks on his web site, “but could never tell whether it would ever amount to much. Well, it’s amounting to more every day, and it’s starting to look like the future of publishing. (If publishing has a future…)”

Oddly enough, the latest news about a Block book serves as a repudiation of sorts of ebooks. Dorchester Publishing, which prints and distributes Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime imprint, announced last week that it would stop publishing mass market paperbacks in favor of ebooks and the occasional trade paperback title. Ardai made it clear that HCC and Dorchester would part ways, because he (rightly) doesn’t see his books as ebooks.

So, the first news he has about the line was a surprise: Subterranean Press will bring out a hardback under the HCC imprint featuring 69 Barrow Street and Strange Embrace, two more early Block titles. Is that a last gasp for print or the sign of things to come? Stay tuned.

To download “The Days When You Were Anything Else,” one of the stories in Sakey’s Scar Tissue collection for free, visit www.smashwords.com/books/view/19303, add it to your cart, and enter coupon code YB98Q.