Autographed Kindles: An e-phenomenon ready to spread?

By David Rothman

Librarian Tom Peters and I once mulled over the idea of virtual book signings at online book fairs.

Why not let writers offer individualized autographs for fans? An author’s signature and personal message could appear within a graphic. Maybe even embedded within the book file itself?

I wonder if someone is even doing this already. After I published the original version of this post, a Portuguese publisher named Eduardo Melo wrote TeleRead and said his writers were signing CDs. But I don’t read Portugese and can’t say whether the signatures were electronic or physical. Perhaps Eduardo or someone else can enlighten us.

Sedaris “on” Kindle: “This bespells doom”

Meanwhile, physically, the autograph phenomenon is happening elsewhere with e-books.

David Sedaris (above photo) signed the Kindle of a fan with the gall to make the request at a p-bookstore, the venerable Strand in New York City (right).

“This bespells doom,” Sedaris joked in his inscription, according to the New Times.

As reported in the Times, “Mr. Sedaris wrote in a recent e-mail message that he has actually signed ‘at least five’ Kindles, and ‘a fair number of iPods as well, these for audio book listeners.’”

The novelist Jennifer Weiner signed a Kindle that housed a half-read e-book of Certain Girls for a fan named Holly West in 2008 at a Barnes & Noble in California. “I felt very embarrassed and like I was doing something wrong,” West reportedly confessed. “It’s a promotional opportunity for both the writer and the bookstore, and if you’re asking for your Kindle to be signed, you’re taking the bookstore out of the process.” Turns out Weiner herself owns a Kindle, by the way.

So what do you think, gang? Just how should e-book writers—or p-writers also appearing in E—handle autographs?

Granted, e-books can offer other forms of customization, such as inserting the customer’s name in place of the existing hero’s. But the age-old desire for autographs will almost surely persist.

Here’s one idea—a mix of a graphics file and a central registry on the Web where the autographs would be on display or be individually hidden behind a password-protected walls, depending on the wishes of the customer.

The autographs of course could carry personal messages from the authors, as noted above, so it was clear that they were not just mass repros.