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For years I've been seeing banner headlines in various publications for writers about how the Age of Electronic Print is Here, and paper had best prepare to bow out before its competitor, which appeals so much more the the up and coming young reader. And it's true that the local public libraries have all sprouted banks of keyboards and monitors, most of them occupied whenever I step inside. I even use the computers there myself (though most often only for what many of the other users are doing, which is looking up the location of print materials on the actual shelves of the brick and mortar branches). Professional publications like Publishers Weekly and the Authors Guild Bulletin carry articles all the time about the latest advances toward the triumph of the electronic book.

Well, here's my experience with the "triumph of the electronic book": it ain't happening any time soon, and in my opinion new or mid-list writers would do better to stick with trying to crack paper publishing for at least a few years longer.

I speak of this as a writer who, with a dozen or so hard copy books to her credit, jumped on the bandwagon of both electronic publishing via download and print-on-demand paper books available through online publishers. My print-on-demand books, which were reprints but of books that had sold respectably in paper a decade or so previously, languished for five years in the back "pages" of the P.O.D. publishers online catalog, buried behind torrents of brightly colored splash-page publicity for the publisher's revolving stock of latest hot-ticket newer acquisitions. On the shelves of a bookstore in print, my books had at least been visible, physically, alongside Harry Potter titles and books by Garth Nix, so that a browsing customer might pull one of mine out for a look. Online, by contrast, my books were non-existent unless the prospective customer took the trouble to burrow through layers and layers of other pages touting newer books and books by people with bigger names than mine. That very important "shelf equality" was lost (this is assuming that a more obscure print novel can hold a place on a bookstore shelf long enough to be found, of course, but that's another story). After five years, I took the books back, and I'm now looking among small presses for someone to reprint them yet again - this time in paper.

As for the book that I had done only as an e-book, it has sold (as a download or on DVD) dismally for seven or eight years now, in part because

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