Why We Published a Novel With No Ebook

Every piece of publishing advice says the same thing: release the ebook. It costs almost nothing to produce, it has no inventory, no shipping, no returns, and the margin is better than print on almost every title.

We published *Utopia of the Infinity Economy* in print only. No ebook, no plans for one.

People keep asking why, usually in a tone suggesting we have made an expensive mistake. Possibly we have. Here is the reasoning.

The reason that is about this book

The novel is set in a world where everything has been optimised. The AI Council's Infinity Economy feeds everyone, houses everyone, removes every obstacle ~ and is quietly starving people of the one thing the machines never learned to value: friction.

Publishing that as a file you can summon in two seconds, read in a backlit rectangle, and lose in a hard-drive migration would be a small betrayal of its own argument.

Not every book has an argument that its format can contradict. This one does.

The reasons that are about books generally

A print run is finite, and infinitude does something. A thousand numbered copies is a real number with a real edge. An ebook has no edge. Scarcity is not only a sales tactic ~ it changes how an object is treated. Books that exist in limited numbers get kept, shelved, lent, and passed on, and the passing-on is how books actually find readers.

Paper does not get revoked. Your ebook library is a licence, revocable, dependent on a company continuing to exist and continuing to want to. This is not hypothetical; titles have vanished from customers' devices before. A book on a shelf is not subject to anyone's business decisions.

Large format, full colour, section tabs. These are physical decisions. A4, colour throughout, tabs you can find with a thumb. None of that survives reflowable text on a phone, and all of it was designed deliberately.

Reading differently. People read print more slowly, remember spatial position on a page, and are demonstrably less likely to skim. For a book meant to be sat with, that is a feature.

What it costs us

Being honest about the bill, because publishing advice that only lists advantages is marketing.

We lose the highest-margin format. We lose every reader who would have bought on impulse at midnight. We lose accessibility features that matter ~ adjustable type size, screen readers, and the readers who depend on them, which is a real loss and not one we are comfortable with. We take on print costs, storage, shipping, customs and the risk of an unsold run. We are invisible to a large part of the book-discovery machinery, which assumes an ebook exists.

That is not a small list. Anyone telling you print-only is obviously correct is selling something.

When it is the right call

When the physical object is part of the argument. As above.

When design does not reflow. Full colour, unusual trim, anything where the layout is the work. Coloring books are the extreme case ~ nobody wants a reflowable coloring book.

When you want a finite, numbered, collectible thing. You cannot number a file.

When your readers are collectors. Some are. Some are emphatically not, and a print-only decision tells them to go elsewhere.

When it is the wrong call

If your book is straight prose, if your readers are commuters, if you rely on discovery through digital storefronts, or if accessibility is central to your audience ~ release the ebook. There is no virtue in the paper for its own sake.

We made this decision for one book, on purpose. It is not a house rule and it is not a moral position about screens.

The thing underneath it

Independent publishing means you get to make the format serve the book instead of the other way round. Most of publishing runs the other way ~ the book is shaped to fit the channel that sells it.

Being small is what makes the choice available. That is the whole compensation for being small, and it seems a waste not to use it.

*Utopia of the Infinity Economy* ~ a single numbered print run, A4, full colour throughout, section-tabbed, unabridged.

Details and reservations: Editor@TingeWorld.com