Tuesday, March 16, 2010

John Grisham joins the e-book craze

By AP

NEW YORK—Best-selling author John Grisham is finally ready to go digital.

More than a year after reports emerged he would make his books available in electronic format, Random House, Inc. made it official Tuesday, announcing that all 23 of his works can be purchased as e-texts.

Mr. Grisham, the author of such favorites as "The Firm" and "The Pelican Brief," has expressed mixed feelings about e-books and the quickly growing market, currently estimated at around 3% to 5% of total sales. In an interview with the "Today" show last fall, he worried that if e-books really caught on "then you're going to wipe out tons of bookstores and publishers and we're going to buy it all online."

"I'm probably going to be all right," he said, "but the aspiring writers are going to have a very hard time getting published."

"John Grisham is one of the greatest storytellers of all time," Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Random House division Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, said in a statement. "This is one of our most exciting e-book initiatives to date and is certain to usher in a new generation of Grisham readers and e-book adopters."

Random House is a unit of Germany's Bertelsmann AG.

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