ZeroGov: Limited Government, Unicorns and other Mythological Creatures is published and live this morning on Amazon. It will be available only as an eBook and therein lies a revolution in writing. No longer stymied and stove piped through the traditional publishing houses, books are taking a plunge into a new frontier that has been maturing since the beginning of the new century. This is both good news and bad.
The good news is that authors will now take home much more than they would over the long term with traditional publishing royalties. We will also see an exponential increase in the number of books available. This speaks to the bad news. There will be an ocean of bad writing, dross and poor thinking on display that has probably not occurred in the millenium that preceded us in the publishing world.
It also means that the number of “real” books will diminish as the electronic variant starts to gain supremacy.
Mind you, it pains me a bit to see the transition. I have a library annex on my house filled from floor to ceiling with thousands of books. I take great comfort to go in there and simply sit with them. Or I may be writing a new blog posting and reach for a text for an arcane reference I cannot find on the web. I love the oft-mentioned tactile feel of a real book; the scent of the pages can even bring back memories to the first time I read it. I have a certain smug satisfaction that haunts the mind of every compulsive completist when I look at the mass treasure trove of Liberty Fund tomes on my shelves. I sit at the desk in my library and can almost feel the authors’ conversations from their books and the sense that if I could only read just a few more before I perished. But I digress.
This is my first book and even more so my first electronic book and it certainly posed challenges in its creation that I will talk about in a future blog post.
The eBook revolution will certainly provide an avenue for those who are philosophically opposed to freedom and liberty to launch fleets of books in the electronic ether that will make the case for government supremacism and the continuation of human slavery but the low cost of entry and relative ease will also allow new voices and thinkers to emerge. There has always been an institutional resistance outside of the specialty publishing houses to run the presses for the likes of Rothbard and von Mises but no longer. There will certainly be more books available, that is the way the market behaves and rightly so.
I hope my small contribution is simply one of many in the new century vanguard of a literal tidal (title – too tempting) wave of books that will make the case for a new phase in humanity where the government loses its legitimacy and more people finally awaken from their statist fever dream. We can only hope.
Notes in the Margin: I am currently working on my first novel, The Cancer Club, which will go to my editor, Jamie Chavez, in February 2013 and be published as an eBook after that is complete.
I will be at PorcFest this week in Lancaster, NH and will be a Keynote Speaker on Friday evening, 22 February 2012. My topic will be: FSP and Peaceful Secession: Divorcing the State One State at a Time
Just downloaded the book and can’t wait to read it tonight. And I’m anxious to read the novel as well.
We’ll just add to that flood of books. I expect that new innovations in printing will mean that the paper book will not perish, at least not right away. If we can print parts for machines, and a matrix for human tissue repair… I see no problem with printing books as well.
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