ZeroGov: Limited Government, Unicorns and other Mythological Creatures is published and live this morning on Amazon.  It will be available only as an eBook and therein lies a revolution in writing.  No longer stymied and stove piped through the traditional publishing houses, books are taking a plunge into a new frontier that has been maturing since the beginning of the new century.  This is both good news and bad.

The good news is that authors will now take home much more than they would over the long term with traditional publishing royalties.  We will also see an exponential increase in the number of books available.  This speaks to the bad news.  There will be an ocean of bad writing, dross and poor thinking on display that has probably not occurred in the millenium that preceded us in the publishing world.

It also means that the number of “real” books will diminish as the electronic variant starts to gain supremacy.

Mind you, it pains me a bit to see the transition.  I have a library annex on my house filled from floor to ceiling with thousands of books.  I take great comfort to go in there and simply sit with them.  Or I may be writing a new blog posting and reach for a text for an arcane reference I cannot find on the web.  I love the oft-mentioned tactile feel of a real book; the scent of the pages can even bring back memories to the first time I read it.  I have a certain smug satisfaction that haunts the mind of every compulsive completist when I look at the mass treasure trove of Liberty Fund tomes on my shelves.  I sit at the desk in my library and can almost feel the authors’ conversations from their books and the sense that if I could only read just a few more before I perished.  But I digress.