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Ian Brown had great fun reviewing the Kindle e-book reader last weekend, and I had great fun reading what he had to say. But, notwithstanding the allure of the Naked Lunch-like eroticism (can a plastic toggle really strike one as being “clitoral”?), I want to say to my fellow author: Get over it.

Writers are in danger of being the last people on Earth to understand the appeal of e-books and their growing importance to publishing (and literacy). There's a long and honourable tradition among writers of clinging to past technology. I'm old enough to remember life before word processing, and how some of our finest scribes huffed that they would never give up their Underwood for a computer. Heck, there were writers who wouldn't give up a manual typewriter for an IBM Selectric.

But the blowback over the arrival of the Kindle in Canada is baffling to anyone who's been paying attention to e-books for more than five minutes. Another digital reading device, the Sony Reader, has been available in Canada for more than a year. I bought one last January, because as an author I thought it was time I learned what this technology was about and how it was going to affect the future of my craft. My publisher, Bloomsbury, had just signed on with Sony, and my upcoming book, Half Moon, would be available as an e-book, whether I liked it or not.

Douglas Hunter's latest book is Half Moon (Bloomsbury).

Last week I found Half Moon on the Sony Store website. I contacted my publisher in New York to see if there was such a thing as a complimentary author copy. He volunteered that I was the first author who had ever asked for one. It didn't surprise me; I had read another author's e-book over the summer and when I mentioned this to him he asked how the photo insert turned out, because he'd never seen the e-book.

The obliviousness/indifference of writers to digital versions of their own work is surreal. It would be like a recording artist only listening to the albums in vinyl and never wondering what the CD was like.

Is the e-book of Half Moon inferior to the hardcover edition? In some ways, yes. I don't like the sans serif font, and it suffers from the same problem I've encountered in most e-books to date that have any sort of illustrative material: The reproduction of the maps is so-so at best. But it's also about $10 less than the hardcover, and for many people that's what matters.

And now that I've experienced the e-book, I know what I need to be asking publishers to do in the future to make digital versions of my work better.

“ The single most important topic being discussed in publishing (at least outside Canada) right now is the e-book ”

I like books printed on paper. I prefer books printed on paper. But I've also bought and read many more books this year for $9-$20 with the Sony Reader than I did when my only option was to drive to a store or order online (and pay shipping) for a paperback or hardcover that was $20-$40 dollars. And so on that front I understand the appeal of the e-book. Yes, the investment in the actual reader has to amortized, but the hook (beyond the convenience of carrying an entire library around in one device and the instant gratification of getting what you want to read in the comfort of your own home) is that price point. And if you're reading on a smart phone, the cost equation is that much more alluring.

Authors who don't understand this growing market, who harrumph about the quality of the reading experience, are going to be trampled by a paradigm shift in the way the written word is packaged and sold. Mr. Brown's dismissal of e-books as being only one half of one per cent of the book market (really?) is misleading and a source of false comfort, because the entire catalogue of books in print has yet to be digitized. That will soon change. My own publisher, Bloomsbury, is still working out an agreement with Amazon for Kindle editions. None of my titles published in Canada are available digitally – yet.

The single most important topic being discussed in publishing (at least outside Canada) right now is the e-book. There is already serious talk of whether or not the big-brand authors will even need publishers as traditionally structured. And authors like me are beginning to see e-books as a way to inject life into a long-dormant backlist. I have books dating to 1981 that are out of print, with no way to put them back into print in a traditional publishing model. Rather than have people continue to read them by buying them second-hand or checking them out of the library, I am now looking at bringing them back as self-published e-books that could be downloaded for perhaps $5.

As for libraries, they're starting to lend e-books, too.

I would be delighted if all my books were issued in stitch-bound hardcover editions that people could afford. But the traditional reading experience is under severe economic pressure, and writers should be careful not to dismiss technology that readers are clamouring to enjoy. The public does not need to be discouraged from employing any innovation that encourages them to read more than they ever did.

Douglas Hunter won the National Business Book Award in 2002 for The Bubble and the Bear. His book God's Mercies was a finalist for the 2007 Writers' Trust Non Fiction Prize and the 2008 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. His latest book, Half Moon, was published in September 2009 by Bloomsbury Press in New York and distributed in Canada by Penguin. He lives outside Port McNicoll, ON.