WHY EBOOKS?
Every once in a while people ask my why I went to ebook editions of my books rather than stick print. Well, the answer to that is easy--I don't have to hassle with publishers.
Book publishers have lots of problems. They have costs, employees, printing, weird tax laws, distributors, booksellers. It is just no profitable for them to keep books in print very long and if you deal in as fringe an area as I do, the profit margin is zero. To put it bluntly, I make a lot more money this way.
And there is another aspect of this that is very important. I have complete control of what comes out. I don't have to deal with the paranoid distributors or the panic-stricken publishers. I can say exactly what I want to say, exactly how I want to say it and not have to worry about such things. The old saying went that freedom of the press belonged to those who have a printing press. Well, now anyone with a computer has a printing press.
Now, ebooks are not for everyone. I sell because I have a built in market. People know who I am and want my material. Others may have a harder time breaking into the market but it is doable. The trick to remember is that these things, while people often make print copies, are, for the most part, going to be read on a computer screen. That means that you need to take certain things into account.
First, you have to have a readable font. People's eyes can get pretty tired if you choose the wrong font and print size that may work fine on paper can be lethal on a screen. Yes, the reader can expand the screen but that creates other inconveniences and you want things to be as easy for the reader as possible.
Second, you have to take length into account. An ebook is going to be shorter than a print book because people's eyes glaze over if it is too long. The ideal length for an ebook is about 100 pages. More can become tiresome in the electronic format and too much less and the reader does not feel that he is getting his money's worth.
Graphics are a mixed bag. You have to have them because plain text on a screen gets boring and people who are used to web pages have come to expect them. But the downside is that they increase the size of the book file and not everyone has broadband. Of course if you are shipping on CD-ROM that problem does not exist and you can make the file as big as the cd can hold. I first conceived of this project back when 14400 modems were fast and the original idea was to not only have the book on cd but small video and audio clips as well. It took a couple years for the technology to make that practical but by then I was working with my present system and it works well, so the large cd-books are pretty much an idea whose time has passed.
So, for those who wonder when I am going back into print, the answer is that I'm not, for the foreseeable future. This is just working too well.