It is really exciting to see the big surge in e-book publishing and sales. It has been a long time coming. My first e-book was published in 1997 with The Fiction Works , a new independent publisher who jumped on the early hype about how e-books were going to take off like wildfire. I remember the conversations with the publisher and the editor about how there were going to be kiosks in shopping malls where people would be able to buy electronic or print-on-demand copies of books and we would all get rich. In the meantime, the books were produced on CDs and packaged much like music, with very nice covers. Customers had an option of buying the packaged CD or buying a direct download to their computer. One nice thing about the CD was that it gave the authors product to have in hand to take to signing events, and we were encouraged to do that kind of promoting. I was living in Nebraska at the time, and there were a few other authors with e-books, so we set out on a little mini-tour of ...