Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly

More than a decade into the e-book revolution, poetry publishers are scrambling to carve out a place in the digital market.

In 2013, publishers released about 2,050 poetry e-books, up from about 200 in 2007, the year the first Kindle came out. In 2013, e-books accounted for roughly 20 percent of the nearly 10,000 poetry books published, compared with around 10 percent in 2012. Of all the literary genres, poetry has proved the most resistant to digital technology, not for stodgy cultural reasons but for tricky mechanical ones. Most e-readers mangle the line breaks and stanzas that are so crucial to the appearance and rhythm of poetry. As a result, many publishers have held back on digitizing poetry, and works by some major poets still are not available as e-books