There is, alas, one reason for big publishers not publishing some of the writers on these lists that never gets suggested: namely, that maybe they're just not very good.

I could be wrong. Maybe all these writers are just as wonderful as they claim to be. But it's hard to believe that when they can't compose a simple e-mail that isn't full of grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors.

I know, I know, e-mail is supposed to be more "informal." But since when does informality excuse sloppiness and incoherence, especially in someone who claims to be a professional writer? A typo or two I can overlook, but an obvious incompetence in the use of the basic tools of English composition--words, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation--indicates to me that maybe this person's work was rejected by the big publishers for good reason, and calls into question the competence of the epublisher who accepted that rejected work.

I'm a big supporter of the idea of electronic publishing, and there are wonderful books available from the independent epublishers. But too many of the posted excerpts I see at the publishers' and individual authors' sites either contain too many errors or are simply too clumsily written to convince me to waste time or money on the complete works.

Am I being unfair? I don't think so. You can tell within a page or two of any book if you are in the hands of someone who knows what he or she is doing, and to whom you can therefore safely entrust that most precious commodity, your pleasure-reading time, or if you are in the hands of a nervous, sweaty-palmed beginner who is liable to fumble the story and your interest in it, thereby squandering your precious time. Why should I take the chance on someone whose writing ability I don't trust? Why should a publisher?

Women who moved into roles once seen as exclusively male preserves over the past few decades soon learned that, however unfair it might be--and it was, and is--they had to be better than the men around them in order to be seen as equal. The same is true of epublishing. If it is to be seen as the equal of print publishing--and the one great desire of exclusively epublished authors is to be considered writers on a par with those whose works appear in print--then epublished authors must be better than their print counterparts, and epublishers must do everything in their power to ensure that the books they publish are as good or better than print published books, both in the quality of the writing and in the quality of the editing.

1:53 PM

I've lived in Canada for most of 34 of my 42 years, but I've never actually become a Canadian citizen. "No good reason," I usually said when people asked me why--I can, after all, take out Canadian citizenship without renouncing my U.S. citizenship and thus become a dual citizen. But now I think I've got a better answer for that question.

The whole country, I will point out, is suffused with ecstatic joy which I do not share or even really understand. "How dare I don the hallowed cloak of Canadian citizenship," I will tell those who ask, "when I am not, and never will be, a communicant of the Church of the Holy Puck, the national religion that is all that binds this great country together?"

I'd really rather have been watching NASCAR racing.