Open Road Media authors share their thoughts on ebooks. Read what Alice Walker, Brian Freemantle, Peter Blauner, Pat Conroy, Scott Spencer, Susan Isaacs, and Patricia C. Wrede have to say about how ebooks have changed how they read and write. 

Peter Blauner, author of Slow Motion Riot

“The first ebook I purchased was Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I'd originally tried to read the book in a classic paperback edition and found it difficult to get into because the stodginess of the translation and smallness of the print (each word was about the size of a crushed ant). But when I downloaded an edition onto my iPhone, the dust fell off the pages and the count spoke to me across the decades. All at once, the book seemed alive, raw and as current as NASDAQ. And within seconds of getting to the end, I had another one of the author's books in front of me (electronically). I'll always love the printed page but a great story is a great story no matter how it ends up in your hands.”

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple

“Part of what ebooks can do is to make it possible for a lot of knowledge and wisdom to be portable, which means you can take it to your mountaintop.”

Brian Freemantle, author of Goodbye to an Old Friend

"The world of books is going to be something entirely different."

Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides

"I think only luddites would object to an ebook. An ebook is going to encourage reading."

Scott Spencer, author of The Rich Man's Table

"To me, a book is a book is a book; it's the same if it's on paper or an electronic tablet. I've sometimes been in the position where I read something about a book and I say, I want to read it right now! And then I have it right now."

Patricia C. Wrede, author of Sorcery & Cecelia

"I adore my iPad, which I’ve had all of six months, but I only have two kinds of books on it: 1) books I already own in hardcopy, but that I want the convenience of being able to read on the road (that would be things like Pride and Prejudice for fun, and The Journals of Lewis and Clark for research), and 2) books that were only ever published electronically, so I couldn’t get them in hardcopy." 

Susan Isaacs, author of Compromising Positions

“My first downloads on my new Sony Reader (back in the dawn of e-civilization) were the freebies:  Hamlet, the US Constitution, Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, Leaves of Grass.  Then I felt guilty about slighting the entire non-English-speaking world, so I added a big, fat Dostoyevsky: the Brothers or C & P;  I forget which.  There was no wireless then, so I ran the cable from my computer to the Reader and watched the progress of the counterclockwise-racing icon.  Wow!  Just like that.  The Sony library at the time wasn't exactly bursting with choices, but the first book I bought was one of Lee Child's Reacher books.

(I read on my iPad now. Loved getting rid of that umbilicus between book and computer.)

I delight in ebooks when I'm on the road. Not in the mood for biography? Jump to an espionage novel. Waiting on line at an airport? A canto or two of Leaves of Grass takes you to a better place. I like the backlight, the ability to change the size of the font, the instant definitions, the highlighting. Looking up the first occurrence of a character's name when reading a giant work of fiction like Wolf Hall to remind me, ‘Who is this guy again?’ I love getting instant access to an academic monograph on Egyptian Jews I needed for my research and not having to wait a month or more for it to get to my local library.

This is what I don't like: not being able to see what people on a bus or a beach are reading."