We have reached our threshold on ebook news for the week — three posts is far more than our limited attention span can manage. In fact, we’d give up now if Publisher’s Weekly hadn’t gone and written an inane sentence:
Other additions to the list—from the astrology guide by Susan Miller, The Year Ahead (at No. 15) to romance titles like J.W. McKenna’s Office Slave, from Renaissance eBooks (at No. 23), and Fictionwise.com’s Winterfair Gifts by Lois McMaster Bujold (at No. 19)—highlight the fact that more women are reading e-books as well.
Okay, we’ll buy the notion the romance is mostly purchased by women. We’ll accept that more women than men buy astrology books (basing this acceptance of the fact that there are some fights you don’t want to enter). And, fine, since Bujold is a woman, we’ll guess she appeals to a more female than male audience. What gets us is the limited scope of the analysis. While individual title sales are not on the scale of The Da Vinci Code, ebook sales to women have been strong since the medium was developed. It’s not just the geeks reading this stuff.
PW bases its story about ebooks on the notion that science fiction sales have been driving the car. This seems to discount the contribution of two other large markets: romance and erotica sold by non-mainstream publishers.
Yes, we would have been much happier if PW had simply noted that more people were reading ebooks.
