Horses for Courses, Platforms and eBooks

I was reading this article on a new area of interest for me: eBooks and ePublishing:

In 1997, crime writer David Hewson published a novel called Epiphany. A literary thriller with a time-shifting narrative, it got good reviews and sold well. A few years later he wrote Native Rites, a more conventional horror story with a straightforward plot. This sold far fewer copies and was remaindered within a year.

But Hewson had a soft spot for Native Rites and eventually decided to self-publish it as an ebook. He did the same with Epiphany. To his surprise, Native Rites has been the bigger hit, outselling Epiphany by three to one. Musing on why, Hewson posits a theory: is e-reading better suited to simple, linear narratives than it is to complex, more literary fiction?

We’ve seen some of these same ‘platform’ difference between console and PC and mobile where a game on one does well in one place and not another. For example Warzone 2100, which did well on PS1 and not so well on PC, though it reviewed well on both. There are also design/content differences that matter between platforms too, which links to how well it does.