By Rachel Toor

It's a perilous time for scholarly publishing; my own university just shut down its press. I applaud those forward-thinking folks who are trying to figure out how to save us all. Which is why, after reading an article in The Chronicle about four university presses that were leading an effort to look into publishing e-books, I sent a message to an e-pal, Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press and past president of the Association American of University Presses, offering a hearty bravo.

I also told Alex that my new favorite thing in the whole world is my Kindle.

In the old days, when I boarded a plane, I got antsy if I didn't have at least three books with me. Any bag I carried had to be big enough to hold at least one, just in case I had to wait somewhere for more than seven minutes.

Then I got my Kindle. For 86 cents I was able to acquire all of the novels of Jane Austen. For the same bit of change I also got all of George Eliot and the complete works of all three Brontë girls. There's nothing like a good 19th-century novel when you're in a doctor's waiting room or stranded on a tarmac. I also got just-published books for $10 each, a whole bunch of them, with a few keystrokes.

On a recent trip to California, I spent a week sleeping in a rental car, riding fast Arabian horses, and running on poison-oak-littered trails. Each night I was tired, dirty, and itchy, but I never ran out of things to read. I got a small light that clips to the top of the Kindle and spent many happy hours nestled in a sleeping bag, scratching until I bled and enjoying novels. Because you can adjust the size of the type, I didn't have to worry about trying to find my drugstore cheater glasses. I was a happy camper.

Before I got my Kindle, my favorite new thing was a subscription to Audible.com. I download books onto my iPod and "read" them while I run (after five hours on gnarly trails while listening to Zadie Smith's On Beauty I was reluctant to stop, because I was enraptured) or in the car (I heard Stephen Ambrose's account of Meriwether Lewis being shot in the butt by one of his men while I cruised over Lolo Pass).

I used to hoard books. My shelves were more a form of self-expression than were my choice of earrings or the kind of car I drove. Then, when I moved west, in a misguided act of stripping down I got rid of almost everything. I've had to buy replacement copies of many books that I learned I could not live without. But I did realize that I've matured enough not to need to show off my intellectual predilections in physical form.

So it doesn't bother me to have a library in electronic form, both on my Kindle and on my iPod. And it makes moving a whole lot easier.

As a writer, my life is less cluttered because of the Internet. A few years ago I ceased to maintain a clipping file. When magazines or newspapers published my work, I'd save at least one physical copy in a folder. No longer. Nearly everything is available online now.

In the past, I couldn't imagine morning without a cup of coffee and The New York Times. Now I drink decaf and am grateful not to have inky fingers when I grab my bagel. In coffee shops you notice the generational divide: Only old folks share sections of the paper; middle-aged couples (and younger) sit with their laptops between them.

Alex Holzman wrote back to say he was curious about how I felt, as an author, about the move to e-books. That caught me up short. I love to read e-books, but, I realized that I'm not sure how I feel about writing them.

I like that people come to my work in unexpected ways. They're sitting outside the dean's office, waiting to be told about budget cuts or scheduling snafus, leafing through The Chronicle, and they find me. Or they visit a friend's house and there sits a piece of my work. Many times I've found fantastic books just by virtue of proximity—they happened to be in the neighborhood of what I was looking for in a store or on a library shelf. I like the hand-me-down quality of good books; when we love something, we urge it on others. Books are easy and good gifts.

As a recovering publisher of scholarly work and someone currently on the tenure track, I understand how messed up the relationship between academe and the marketplace is. When colleagues tell me their ideas for turning dissertations into books, or even the topics of their second or third monographs, I can't help thinking (and sometimes say): Who on earth is going to buy that? The library market is so dry it's caked over and cracked. Monographs, with rare and notable exceptions, don't get much use as course books except in small-enrollment seminars.

But the expectation is that we keep putting out books that don't promise to make anyone—publishers or authors—money, because that is the fundamental enterprise in which we are all engaged. With many university presses having their subsidies cut or eliminated, it's clear that something needs to be done.

Electronic books might make the scholarly endeavor sustainable. University presses would still be responsible for vetting and editing manuscripts; everything else would change. As Alex pointed out to me in our e-mail exchange, the entire distribution system would be overhauled. No physical copies would mean no returns, no used books, and the possibility of rentals with an option to buy. Campus stores would have more room for T-shirts. I'm hoping it would also mean no more godawful signings after readings.

The next generation will likely find our attachment to paper quaint. Remember rotary phones and audiocassettes? Remember getting free dinners on airplanes?

I think back to the old days, when I'd publish something and then never hear a peep about it, or if I did, it would be in the form of a letter that arrived months (or years) after publication. Now I'm spoiled and needy; I've become accustomed to having my in box filled with responses to my work the day it's published. I like being able to track how much attention my essays are getting (though I never read Web-site comments, lest anonymous, mean-spirited critics prompt me to want to stop writing or put my head in an oven).

When it comes right down to it, in most respects, publishing electronically is likely to be more rewarding than publishing in print: faster, bigger readership, easier to get responses. It really is a way of engaging in a national conversation.

As someone who lived for six years off the (modest) advances for two trade books, I do wonder how remuneration for authors of e-books would work. How would royalties and advances be affected? That is usually not much of an issue for scholarly books, but still, there's always a chance your monograph could be the next paradigm-shifter, like Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Alex told me that Kathy Peiss's Cheap Amusements has sold more units than any other book in Temple's 40-year existence. It is about women and leisure in New York City from 1880 to 1920. Who would have guessed? In this case, royalties are a Very Good Thing.

In our e-conversations, Alex raised a host of issues that authors need to worry about, and I realized I hadn't even begun to think this stuff through. What constitutes a sale, and what's a subsidiary transaction? For instance, what should you earn from a rental? From the downloading of just a portion of your book? What does it mean for you to get "free copies" of an e-book? Will there be new and more stringent restrictions on how you can use your own material? Or fewer restrictions than there are now?

If you use third-party illustrations in your books, do you worry about the cost of permissions going through the roof? Will the e-version of your book appear with big X's where the illustrations should be? What about the "cover" design?

What does a sales territory short of "world" mean in an electronic environment? Do foreign-language rights become all you can sell? I just received a chubby check for the Korean translation of my first book. Selling subsidiary rights is getting money after the sweat has dried and you've long since forgotten you ever did the work. It's a beautiful thing. How will that change in an e-book land?

While I am devoted to my Kindle, I understand that with e-publishing, there's a whole lot more to think about than enjoying a good novel in your sleeping bag. We—authors and publishers—need to ask the right questions and then work together to figure it all out.

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane. Her Web site is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and questions directed to careers@chronicle.com.