John Grisham Changes Mind About E-Books

TechFlash reports: John Grisham, the author of numerous best-selling legal thrillers, has been a vocal skeptic of electronic books, saying they pose a threat to publishers, bookstores and aspiring authors.

But Grisham has apparently had a change of heart. Random House announced today that 23 of Grisham's backlist titles — from "The Firm" to "Ford County" — will now be available in digital form.

Amazon.com wasted no time cranking up its marketing machine. The online retailer immediately started touting Grisham e-books for its Kindle reader.

"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," Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Random House division Knopf Doubleday, says in a statement.

Grisham's short story collection "Ford County" was one of ten hardcover books at the center of an e-commerce price war last year between retailers Amazon.com, Wal-Mart and Target. Grisham slammed the heavy discounting (which took "Ford County" down to $9) in a Today show interview, calling it a "disaster in the long-term" for the book publishing industry and aspiring authors.

Grisham in the interview added:

The uncertainty comes with the e-market. Five years from now, how many of us are going to be reading books on Kindles and all these Sony readers, these beautiful gadgets and devices, that are going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper? If half of us are going to be doing it, then you're going to be wiping out tons of bookstores and publishers and we'll buy it all online.

Amazon is selling the backlist Grisham books for Kindle at between $5.99 and $9.99. It will be interesting to see what happens when a new Grisham book comes out — whether it will be available for Kindle at the same time as hardcover and at what price for the digital version. Those factors have been sticking points in Amazon's dealings with other publishers.