Amazon isn’t giving out much info, but informal sources are reporting that the snowballing growth of e-book reading is made up primarily of commercial fiction. My own experience bears this out; over the past few weeks I have read more suspense fiction electronically than I have ever read before in print. It’s not just the price, either. There’s something irresistible about the popcorn-eating effect of finishing one novel and starting the next one without even getting up off the couch. My previous experience was that sometimes I’d be reading a book, but there would often be downtime before I got around to choosing a next one. Now there are simply no barriers to non-stop reading, and without having bought a physical book, I don’t feel like I’m being somehow overindulgent as I move from one to the next.

So after finishing George Dawes Green‘s terrific new novel, Ravens, I immediately ordered his first one, The Caveman’s Valentine, a brilliant book that fully deserved its Edgar Award.

If my experience is any indicator, the downward pressure on price from e-books might very well be counter-balanced by something we can all feel good about, and hopefully find a way to make money from: a newly voracious appetite for page-turners (or page-clickers, as I guess we’ll now need to say).