Have I started a trend by releasing The Tourist Trail in digital format ahead of print?
While I’d certainly be happy to take the credit, I’m afraid I wasn’t the first to put electronic first. But I’m clearly not going to be the last.
Random House Canada just released its first eBoook — The Very Thought of You, by Rosie Alison.
Why did they do this? Speed appears to be the driving force. Says the president of Random House Canada:
It is exciting that the eBook format allows us the opportunity to make Rosie Alison’s prize-winning novel available to Canadian readers right away. While we publish most eBooks simultaneous with the print edition, we are very open to opportunities such as this where it makes sense to bring out the eBook first.
As for The Tourist Trail, I expect the Kindle version to be fully live as early as tomorrow. It’s actually already available, but the book description and a few other meta details are still not live. On average, it takes about 48 hours for a book to go live on the Kindle store.