Changing face of writing

I'm did a short lesson to my ABE students on communicating.  And it dawned on me how writing is changing.

Ebooks in the last few years has become a bigger market.  You may say you never knew ebooks existed before until Amazon came out with the Kindle.  But I've known about ebooks for many years.  Before the Kindle, the main device to read ebooks on was the Palm Pilot, and it used the file format of .pdb .

Newspapers are finding harder and harder to keep up with their expenses.  As a result some are forced to go down the online only option.  Here in St Louis, one resurrected as an online only newspaper, The St Louis Globe Democrat.

Publishing has also changed.  No longer do you have the only option of going to a publisher and pony up money to print your work.  You can self publish online.  You can get your own ISBN numbers, do the copyright registration online and sell your work as an ebook.  Who will sell these?  You can self sell on Scribd.com, but also BarnesandNoble.com and Borders.com have programs where you can submit your work.

Creative writing is changing.  The biggest change is that you can publish your creative work online via blogger, Scribd.com or maybe even facebook or some social network.  Its wonderful to have readers read your stuff you made from the heart.  These sites often have stats of reads.  And getting these stats gives you encouragement to continue.

Those are the options available today.  Who knows what will happen in the future?  Perhaps a mind meld to the frontal lobes via some contraption strapped to our heads.