Pros and Cons about E-books?

[annied]

Hi there!

I'm considering setting up my own E-book on a website, but I've no idea how to start. :shrug Anyone out there experienced in this, and what do you like/dislike about it?

Thanks, Annie:grin

[maestrowork]

Most people (at least anyone older than 25 :-) ) still prefer holding a physical book, turning a physical page, smelling the physical smell.

I'm a technophile and I even have a handheld e-book reader, but I find myself reading more books in print -- I have, perhaps 10 e-book titles and I haven't finished any one of them. Or it's just me.

E-books do have the convenient factor and you can download it NOW instead of waiting for it or going to the bookstore. It's not really that portable even if you have a laptop -- and you can't take it to some places (like the bathroom... hahaha).

As for setting it up, it's pretty easy. Most E-books are either in PDF (Adobe Reader) format or Microsoft Reader format. The only issue is permission and rights. You want only the people who purchase it to be able to download and open the book, sometimes also limited to only one physical machine.

[arainsb123]

Use Natata free e-book compiler. Your book will be immune from printing and copy-and-pasting.

[Mridu]

As a reader, I'd hate not being able to print out pages of a book. I have absolutely no intention of distributing those pages or anything, but I would like to be able to print out certain pages for reference or to read at leisure.

Why would someone spend $10-20 on an e-book only to be stuck in front of a computer monitor? I'd at least like to know I have an option.

[veingloree]

I, like most people, far prefer paper books. I will buy the occassional e-book but only from reputable e-publishers or through good distributors like ebookad.com. Self-vendor stuff is almost always of a low quality so I would only consider it if it was the kind of product I really wanted and could get nowhere else. Personally I suggest using a distributor rather or as well as self-vending.

[bfdc]

E-books will continue to be more and more a part of our society. Perhaps a reader that looks and smells like a book, with LCD "pages" that turn, batteries that last for a million hours of use. After the next generation hands down its set of "smelly book readers" to its children, those children will begin to be weaned off the smell of dust and mold and be happy with reading from a screen. A 1024-MB card the size of a thumbnail might contain a whole bookshelf of books.

I see it happening as sure as I changed my mind about computers and e-mail in the 90s.

Bob/bfdc

[veingloree]

I don't see it until the reading interfaces are much better. I have a webpage, live online, love email, and am e-published -- but I hate pdf books and the dust is on my rocketbook reader not my bookshelf.

[maestrowork]

Well, it's happening (with kids who grow up reading off LCD screens) but it'll probably take another 10 years, at least, for e-books to really take hold. There are new technologies evolving now (mobile ink, etc.) that not only may once and for all push e-books into the limelight, but also reinvent all print media including newspaper (imagine a thin "page-turn" device that can download and store any material including daily newspapers, magazines, online sites, as well as books...

But it hasn't happened yet, and won't be for a while.

[arainsb123]

"Use Natata free e-book compiler. Your book will be immune from printing and copy-and-pasting."

You can turn off the printing-block.

[Food Writer]

For purchasers they satisfy the need for immediacy when they have a need to read on a particular topic. They also provide books on topics that arent' being published widely, perhaps because there isn't enough interest to invest in printing them.

I'm biased, sure, because I have an ebook through an ebook publisher. The ebook has been available for over 4 years, and my monthly royalty check averages $150. I am now starting my own ebooks to sell from my own website and hope that I can make some extra money through that endeavor. But marketing the ebooks is extremely important! Gotta sell those babies.

I do buy ebooks sometimes, but even then if the ebook is good (and I"ve only bought non-fiction, how-to ebooks) I will print it out and put it in a file folder so I can read it on the go, and will still have in case the ebook file goes bad, or the CD or disk get corrupted.

I'm going to publish my ebooks in Adobe Acrobat, but am not decided as to whether I'll put in photos and clip art! So many do and that drives me crazy but it does break up the type if you're reading it on the screen...

I'll let you know how my ebooking goes when I find the time to finish editing the three manuscripts I have ready, well, nearly ready, each edit sends me back for more research. :)

Pam
www.food-writing.com

[veingloree]

Ebook pay less per copy and in general fewer people buy them. Mosyt people buy ebook from established publishers where there is some guarantee of the quality. That said if you can tap a niche market it can still be worthwhile (self-help, erotica etc).

[skylarburris]

I first sold my novel Conviction (http://www.literatureclassics.com/ancientpaths/conviction.html) as an E-book. I designed my E-book using Microsoft Word and then converted it to PDF using Adobe Acrobat. I had clip art for a cover. I made it available for order from my website and had people pay using Paypal. I then e-mailed them the e-book and thier password to access it. I sold it for just $4 a copy, but I got all $4 as profit, since it costs nothing for me to produce an E-book (I already owned Adobe Acrobat and already owned the website, so no added cost there.) A $4 profit per sale is more than you will get for most hard copy books.

I only sold a few copies, however, and I received a few e-mails from people saying they really wanted to read the book but didn't want to read it on a computer screen. Did I have it in hard copy?

So I decided to bring it out in softcover using a vanity POD and remove the E-book from my website. So far I have sold about 160 copies of the softcover (I published five months ago); once I actually get my latest royalty check (it takes 90 days from a sale for the money to get to me), I will have made back my set-up fee plus a small profit.

So, in my experience, E-books are not good sellers. On the other hand, if you already have the website and the software, they are all profit, so even if you only sell a few copies, you're ahead! And that will also allow you, possibly, to get feedback from readers and to learn if there is a potential market for the book in softcover.

[DeadlyAccurate]

One area where e-books have done fairly well is in the roleplaying games industry. In the past, the people who owned the Dungeons & Dragons licensed was the only group allowed to produce products for that gaming system (and whomever they licensed, obviously). The latest version of the gaming system uses an open gaming system, which means most of the rules are free for anyone to use, so long as you follow certain rules. That meant an explosion in companies producing RPG-related products.

But the RPG industry is small, and the vast majority of the companies are even smaller (often just one or two people). That meant that traditional publishing methods are out for them and the only cost-effective solutions was in e-books. Enter a site called rpgnow.com. They are the premier location for purchasing RPG products in PDF format. Another site, called DriveThruRPG.com offers products protected with DRM technology, usually products that were or are also in print.

Sales of PDF products are still low in comparison to traditional markets (Someone selling a few hundred copies of a product is considered successful), but I definitely see a day when certain types of products are only available electronically. Some of the benefits (searching, copying/pasting, printing) of electronic books make up for the downsides, for certain products.

[Medievalist]

I'm obviously biased since I started working in the e-book industry in 1989. That means that although I do like e-books, and buy them, I have strong opinions about them.

I'm not interested in an e-book that I can't search, annotate, and copy passages from with an automatic citation. I find most encryption schemes annoying and rather useless; the exceptions to this are Embiid and the Palm / Peanut Press format.

I don't consider most .pdf files to be e-books because they're designed to be printed out; an e-book is designed for the screen. Adobe's e-book format is marginally better.

I generally read e-books on an ancient Palm PDA, and usually, when I'm traveling since it will hold several books.

As a Mac user I don't like or use Microsoft's .lit format.

[roach]

Hello YAEP* here with some rambling, off the top of my head comments.

I'd say that e-books work the best when:

a) they provide functions you would not get from a print book (search and annotation fuctions, etc.)
b) they provide an economic advantage over print publishing (i.e. novellas, chapbooks, short story collections, the kinds of fiction that isn't often published because the demand just doesn't justify the expense of printing)
c) readers perceive that the works have been edited. This means just offering copies of your unpublished novel from your own site will not draw as many readers as e-books offered by publishers. For good or ill readers equate quality writing with works that have been edited.
d) they are published in conjuction with a print novel. Cory Doctorow provides a good example, giving away his novels free as e-books.

I think the various formats serve different purposes. PDF is great for creating beautifully laid out e-books and for allowing readers to print out (in this case the e-book really is a print book that is being distributed electronically). I dislike the Adobe E-book and MS Reader formats. I prefer Mobipocket format. But I have four different readers on my PDA so that I can read just about any format out there.

And for anyone who is interested: May 6 - 12 is "Read an E-book" week.

*Yet Another E-book Publisher

[Richard]

Just jumping in on this one. Software like Natata should be frogmarched to the village square and pelted with rotten fruit until it apologises.

"The only issue is permission and rights. You want only the people who purchase it to be able to download and open the book, sometimes also limited to only one physical machine."

You're not important enough to make this worth giving even the faintest damn about. I say this with absolute certainty, because I can think of absolutely nobody who is important enough to get away with the restrictions that commercial ebooks hand out as a matter of course.

If you approach it from the angle of 'How can I stop people reading my book without permission?', you'll waste loads of time on a futile quest for technology that will annoy your customers and slow down passing pirates for about ten seconds, max. If I've bought your book, there is not one single thing that my printing a copy out to read on the train, or reading the thing on my desktop and PDA, is going to do to affect your profit, because the chance of my buying two copies is precisely zero. Possibly the person you're trying to get will get stopped at the gate, but that won't make you any more money. However, by annoying me, a paying customer, over something that makes such little difference, you've just shot yourself in the foot and pretty much guaranteed losing my custom on future books.

[Medievalist]

Most of the e-books I read are the digital equivalent of paper back fiction, and I generally read them on planes.

But e-books can be so much more. And like Richard, I'm not a fan of encryption. Palm's is tolerable because it's tied to the credit card I use to purchase the books with, and I can change it if I wish.

But that isn't the kind of e-book I'm interested in, really. What I'm excited about and by is the potential for designing and creating books for the screen that take advantage of all the digital realm has to offer; those are my favorite kinds to work on.

[roach]

Yep, DRM (digital rights management, or encryption) is a bad idea in the current implementations. I don't know if there will ever be good DRM or if it is really needed, but the way some publishers go about it these days is more than annoying, it ends up telling potential customers, "We don't trust you. We're convinced that you will infringe upon our copyrights so we are going to cripple our wares."

Secondly, DRM seems unneccesary at this stage. On an e-book discussion list the other day someone posted a link to a website where pirated books were offered for trade. With the exception of one title, all the e-books were print books that had been digitized. Right now people are pirating paper books that are not available in e-book format.

[Medievalist]

Right now people are pirating paper books that are not available in e-book format.

Unfortunately, they're pirating those that are as well. I have two problems with pirate versions of books otherwise unavailable in e-book format.

First, publishers use the existence of a pirate version as an excuse not to release a legit version, or to release one with unfriendly DRM. (Any DRM you use will be cracked; the more exotic and intriguing the DRM, the more likely it is to interest crackers.)

Second, the pirate versions not only don't pay the author a dime, they're often really crappy, crappy enough to embarass the author, because of poor scanning and text manipulation and / or import into whatever shell is used.

[The Geek]

I, personally, am a fan of ebooks. It helps that I spend my days in front of a computer and I publish an e-zine. But done right, I think e-books can be worth it. Especially if you do an eReader version (or something that can be read on a handheld).

One thing I would suggest, though, is to still try for a nice cover. You don't want the ebook to look like you threw it together because it was cheap and easy to do. Even ebooks can look professional (or amateur).

[Richard]

One thing I would suggest, though, is to still try for a nice cover. You don't want the ebook to look like you threw it together because it was cheap and easy to do. Even ebooks can look professional (or amateur).

And remember the key piece of advice:

BRYCE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

[The Geek]

And remember the key piece of advice:

BRYCE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

Amen! :Clap:

[mmm... pancakes]

One thing I would suggest, though, is to still try for a nice cover. You don't want the ebook to look like you threw it together because it was cheap and easy to do. Even ebooks can look professional (or amateur).

I know this is an old thread, but I'm in the process of compiling my own e-book. Geek, how would you go about making a nice cover? What is considered nice by e-book standards?

My hope is, once I've finished, to list the e-book with booklocker.com. Anyone done this before? Experiences?

[Richard]

Can't help on the Booklocker thing, but 'nice' by e-book standards is basically anything that doesn't make your eyes actively melt out of their sockets at the fusion of cyan on purple text from MillionBillionFreeCrappyFonts.com, pasted over a bad Poser figure or clip-art woman.

Just hit www.fictionwise.com and look in the 'Fantasy' section. I'm not saying they're all awful, but you can consider one hell of a lot of them as a training series in What Not To Do.

[mmm... pancakes]

Cheers, Rich.

[The Geek]

I know this is an old thread, but I'm in the process of compiling my own e-book. Geek, how would you go about making a nice cover? What is considered nice by e-book standards?

Well, to begin, don't look to ebooks for the standard of good covers. Look at the big boys. If you want to have an image/painting/etc. on the cover, get a professional artist to do it. There are so many out there, you might find someone who will let you use their art for very cheap. Another route is to not have a picture, but to use nice lettering and a textured background for the cover. I've seen anthologies use this to good effect, though the really nice ones and the text embossed or something.

I would suggest coming up with a cover and then post it here for us to look at. I'd be happy to give you some thoughts on it. :)

[Medievalist]

If you're going to make an e-book do it right; that is, design and produce the book for a specific platform/reader. If it's going to be read on a screen, design it to make it as pleasant as possible for screen reading; if it's going to be printed on the purchasers printer, design it for that purpose.

I hate e-books that are straight dumps of a word processor file into a .pdf.

Feh.

[mmm... pancakes]

You guys rock. I'm not exactly an experienced writer, so any and all help welcomed :Hail: .

Right, well my book is not destined for the bestseller list, though I believe it has a small niche market.

The book is for English teachers abroad - like me - who teach children who have never spoken a word of English before in their lives: absolute beginners. Hence the shatteringly original title: EFL for absolute beginners. The idea is that someone buys this book for the general tips and the details of my own experiences, but mostly for the worksheets and games file. That means some of it will be read, some will be printed, and some will hopefully be used as a reference. I'm not sure if I really need a title page, but...?

Here goes putting the two (VERY early draft) titles pages I have already. Be nice (please).
http://paintedover.com/uploads/show.php?loc=19&f=title2.jpg

Well, I can't seem to get the other one to work. Comments on the one welcome, then. :Shrug:

I once downloaded Jenna's e-book template thingy, and that basically just had the title in the middle of the page, and a border around the outside. How far do I need to go?

PS the background for the draft title page above is from clipart. I'm assuming it's not okay to actually use it... any thoughts?

[Richard]

It depends on the licensing agreement. If you need stock photography but can't afford to pay the big boys, try http://www.sxc.hu for a huge collection of free images you can use.

That one's a little overcomplicated, I think - too many words scattered all over the place. Look at hard-cover books and design based on those.

[LloydBrown]

I hate e-books that are straight dumps of a word processor file into a .pdf.

Let's say I'm doing one of these anyway, mostly as an experiment.

My source allows only pdfs.

Any advice?