Me and My Kindle: A Short History

As an author, I have had a long and complicated love and hate affair with eBooks, and know this will sound self-serving, but my first mystery novel, Hour of the Manatee, was the very first book ever published in electronic format. It happened like this: I'd been doing a reading of my second Tony Lowell Mystery, Eye of the Gator at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida, when a man came up to me afterwards and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. His name was Don something (real name best forgotten in any case) and he claimed to have invented the first eBook reader. Moreover, he had a working model to prove it. The year was 1997.

What Don wanted was a book that had some public visibility to convert onto his reader as a demo, and my first book, as a national book award winner and still selling well, would suit his purpose perfectly, and I could see no down side at the time. So I agreed. Don's business plan, such as it was, was to publish eBooks in mini-disk format (he had a roughly one-inch square prototype on which to install my book) and sell them in converted cigarette machines, which were being phased out at the time all across the country. What I especially liked about his prototype reader was that it had a built-in search engine so that you could search any word or name back and forth in the text, which has always been my number one complaint about traditional books--having to flip back through numerous pages or chapters to find out who the heck Mrs. McGillicuddy was, whose name has suddenly popped up again. Those of you who read and enjoy George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones) know what I'm talking about. Martin's series has 2000 characters (yes, two thousand--not a typo) and that's a lot of people to keep track of. So it was that search engine feature, really, that sealed the deal (the built in dictionary was nice too).

At that time my agent was Dan Strone at the William Morris Agency in New York. I called Dan and told him about the eReader prototype, and he asked Don and I to come up to New York immediately to show it to him. Don, an old-time Florida cracker from a prior generation, seemed less than thrilled with the idea, but I finally coaxed him into making the trip, so we did. It seemed strange, having to drag him kicking and screaming to the offices of the largest and most powerful literary agency in the world, but I could understand, or thought I could: a small town southern boy's reluctance and apprehension at being exposed to the Big Apple and the Big Time, with little preparation other than having seen a few episodes of Seinfeld (whose agent, as it happened, was also Dan Strone). In any case we made the trip, made it to the William Morris Agency offices without incident, and found ourselves seated in the very prime seat of power, as it were, of the literary world. Dan, who had sold the book in question a few years earlier for me, took one look at the demo, excused himself, and hurried down the hall. A few moments later he returned with another man in tow: a shorter, dark-haired gentleman in a gray suit, who very politely followed Dan back into his office. "This is Robert Gottlieb," said Dan, thus introducing the number one literary agent, then or now, in the publishing world.

Bob Gottlieb shook hands with us, took one look at Don Something's prototype, and said, very simply and bluntly: "We'd like to represent this." I looked at Don, my eyes beaming, my pulse racing, and to my astonishment he put it away, shrugged nonchalantly, and mumbled something along the line of "I'll think about it." Strone and Gottlieb were obviously taken aback, and my first thought--apart from embarrassment--was that Don was playing hard to get. We left, me awash in confusion, apologizing to my agent for the possible delay.

Going down the elevator, Don was seething with righteous redneck rage. "Is there a problem?" I asked him. He muttered something inaudible. I finally got it out of him out on the sidewalk, as we hurried back to our hotel. "I can't believe," he snarled, as we dodged a taxi, "that you brought me all the fuckin' way to New Yawk City to meet with some fuckin' JEWS!"

True story. Sadly, Don's bigotry was costly to me as well. The William Morris Agency did not take kindly to such a rebuff, and I soon found myself in search of a new agent. As for Don, he, and his invention, are both relegated to the dustbin of history. And unlike its inventor, the eReader with it's built-in search engine were pretty good ideas, albeit ahead of their time. Someone else was bound to come up with another one, sooner or later. Right?