eBooks and eArticles

[edwest]

E-books


All of the above still applies except no printing or distribution costs. And you can do any page count as you'd like.

Minuses:

E-books are priced too low to sustain an actual publishing company. For individuals or a small group, you're not likely to see much in the way of compensation, but hey, something is better than nothing, eh?

My company sells PDFs of some of our older titles and a few out of print titles as well. I can't speak to military book sales, but in our fiction niche, the returns are low. In our case, they are still enough to pay a bill or two when combined with our physical book sales

We also use DRM (Digital Rights Management) or watermarks on each book. This does not stop but helps to deter piracy.

Piracy. Unless you add significant anti-copy protection, your book or article can and will end up on a file stealing site. I just received a message from one of our freelancers that he found some of our books on a "file sharing" site. The only thing protecting these sites from prosecution for now, is an irrational law that allows anyone to download anything to their site without supervision. According to the law, the site must be notified by the copyright holder and a take-down form must be sent to them by a company officer.

Don't be fooled. People have taken our books, hardcover and softcover, and made perfect digital copies available for nothing. Nothing. The price everyone can afford.

You can do this from your own web site or use other book related web sites, but everybody takes a cut. As far as I know, Kindle books are good for page after page of solid text and nothing else, and require special formatting.

Pluses:

Updates and corrections can be made and the book or article re-released.


It may be that your book or collection of articles sell well enough that they can be offered in a print format later on.






Hope this helps,
Ed