A literary agent goes electronic
Like any good revolution, it began on May Day: I ordered a Kindle. Or maybe it began a few weeks earlier, when a friend picked up my briefcase (full of manuscripts) and was stunned at how heavy it was. “Stuart,” he said, “E-books.” Maybe it was my colleague Shana (who posts most of the tech tips you’ll read here) who’d been over the moon about hers for the past three weeks, and the smile on her face when she told me someone on the subway had approached her, asking “Wow! Is that a Kindle?”
But the tipping point came on the 1st of May, when my friend Joy showed me hers at breakfast. So I ran back to the office and one-clicked myself a Kindle. “My God,” said the first client who came to see me that day, clearly feeling as though the earth had shifted beneath his feet. “And I was here on the day it happened.” So here I am: a literary agent who has forsaken paper to read his manuscripts electronically. Have I become the capitalist who sold the rope?
