AMBA and ebooks

There have been a number of good reports about AMBA -- that glamour highlight of my September -- when the authors of Mills & Boon meet to eat, drink and socialise. The Pink Heart Society, Kate Hardy and Fiona Harper have all done excellent reports. And I personally had a great time but then I was organising the thing and so had some say in the menu, wine and location... But I was very relieved to hear that everyone enjoyed themselves.

One of the more interesting bits of news to come out of AMBA are the M&B e-books. They have been promised for a long time and finally they have arrived. Waterstones.com is now offering the entire front list for Mills & Boon in e-book, -- Sony Reader book format. So for example, An Impulsive Debutante is currently available as a download along with the rest of the M&B September offerings. Plans are well advanced to have the e-books available from the M&B website by the end of the year as well as from the WH Smith website. I believe they will also be available as mobipocket on the M&B website. Amazon have yet to release Kindle in the UK.

At AMBA, I finally was able to physically hold an e-book. They are different, but I can see the attraction for some people. Apparently there are lots of features to allow you to bookmark pages, skip pages and generally move through the book. A page of text is displayed at a time and you can adjust the font size to suit your eyes.

Will e-books replace more conventional books? Who knows. I like the ease of paper. I like being able to read anywhere and not to have to worry about leaving the book behind. Occasionally I underline or make notes in margins of books. But there is also the storage problem. And I can see if some one is travelling a lot or has poor eyesight why the ebook reader might be the way to go. At the moment, I am just pleased that HM&B have decided to embrace the technology.

Currently I am still doing my revisions on the Viking but it is getting better.