Via the video magic of Big Think, we asked novelist Bret Easton Ellis about digital books–learning about his iPad, eBook royalties, and the future of the novel.
Ellis explained why he bought an iPad: “[A] friend of mine showed me his iPad and how he was reading books on it, and how he bought more books once he had the iPad than he had ever bought that last six month on Amazon or going to a bookstore.”
He concluded: “the idea of a book costing not $25 anymore but $10 means you’re also wiping away a lot of the cost of making a book. You know, the printing, the shipping, et cetera. And so the royalty rates for authors are shifting as well. So it’s not as authors are necessarily going to lose money on their work in terms of people like buying to download them. The royalty rate is actually going to be the same, if not more, because they’re cutting out all those other costs.”