Creating And Selling E-Books
The Pros & Cons For Creating Electronic Books
The debate on eBooks, or
electronic books, and electronic publishing rages on even though this market
is still in its infancy. No one denies the Internet has opened incredible
new doorways of accessability to markets for writers. It will be interesting
to see how much impact this medium will have on writers, agents, and publishers
in the years to come.
We're going to sidestep the
fearmongering and the extremist supporters for this new method of distributing
books and deal in this part of our topic with the simple pros and cons
of electronic books, listing them in point form, random order.
Advantages For Creating E-Books
Enthusiastic supporters of
electronic publishing include writers, publishers, and readers new to this
medium. They are eager to point out the advantages.
For the writer, advantages
are claimed to be:
-
increased readership,
-
a reasonable monetary return
for their work,
-
the continuing ability to control
the rights to his or her work.
For the customers of written
works, the advantages are claimed to be:
-
portability (some hardware
readers store up to 10 books),
-
convenient storing (imagine
that bookcase fitting into one tiny PC),
-
less expensive (or so it appears
at this stage of the market),
-
instantly available through
downloads.
For publishers, the advantages
are claimed to be:
-
paperless mass production makes
it far less expensive,
-
potential end of the "out of
print" era,
-
easy distribution (with many
new methods - on-line distributors, customer direct, affiliate programs...)
Disadvantages For Creating E-Books
The main disadvantage to
eBooks is the lack
of standard formats used today. Different hardware readers read the
electronic information differently. This creates confusion for customers,
since they must know which format to purchase in order to be able to read
the eBook. Many customers are not well versed enough in software applications
to be able to know which eBooks are compatable for their systems. This
also creates difficulties for publishers in determining which formats to
have available. Hopefully the Open eBook Initiative
will take care of this problem in future, however, in a perfect world we
have our own dreams of what the
perfect eBook Reader would be.
Briefly, here's a list of
some of the disadvantages to eBooks:
-
limited inventories of goods
offered by any one vendor,
-
lack of standard formats among
products and vendors,
-
lack of universal catalogs,
and
-
price for the hardware
readers.
The Multi-Media Advantage Of E-Books
One very important advantage
to e-Books not listed under Pros is the multi-media capability of eBooks.
Imagine adding sound to your book. How about
moving
graphics? And rich color photographs...
These are things difficult (impossible?) to achieve in printed books. I
can already imagine the educational materials which will be flooding the
markets soon. How-to manuals of the future will be vastly different from
those of the past! Add to this the ability to tie in hyperlinks
instead of footnotes to refer to specific sites on the net for further
information on any given topic. And now, with the latest version of E-ditor
Software we can add the versatility of HTML4
and plug-ins! Well... the possibilities are endless, for both the
writer and the reader!
While we wait for the
industry to catch up with the demands for this new form of written works,
lets move on as writers
to some Tips and for Writing and publishing your own
eBook.
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