Electronic Books
The signs are there: electronic publishing is coming of age. What signs?
Well, the best one is that large multinational companies are scrambling
to get some of the action. What electronic publishing? Well, there's having
books in computerised form, so that printers can "print on demand" as few
as a single copy, there's distributing books on Compact Disc to read on
a computer instead of in a paper book. Then there's putting the book on
the Internet for people to read there or download and finally there are
the portable "readers" (specialised computers, really) which can be loaded
up with specially formatted files.
All these methods have their advantages and disadvantages, but their
main virtue is that authors can have their work published without having
to persuade a publisher to invest thousands of pounds in printing and stock
before they see a penny in return. And because of the much lower investment
needed, the books can be sold much more cheaply without the auther having
to accept lower royalties - which can be up to 75%. It also makes self-publishing
much easier - any you can keep all the profits for yourself!
There are four main formats for electronic books at the moment, and
we can convert your book to any of them:
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Portable Document Format (.pdf) is used in the conventional printing
industry, to transfer documents between computers and printing equipment,
while maintaining all formatting and picture placement. It is now much
used for putting complicated documents - especially instruction manuals
and the like - on the Internet. The software to produce it is expensive,
but reading software is free. Download from Adobe.
-
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - the native format of the World WideWeb.
This is everywhere, and is increasingly being used as a basic format which
can be converted to other formats for the specialised readers.
-
Rocket eBook, for use only on the Rocket Reader, which is the commonest
of the special readers. Files can be converted to this format, but if you
want Rocket to sell the books for you they have to be encrypted for copyright
security and only Rocket can do this at present. See the Rocket
Reader
-
Softbook. This is a rather expensive reader, not very common as yet,
but conversion is possible via Microsoft Word 2000 (into which we can convert
most material.) Details at Softbook
Press.
This page will be expanded shortly with more information on where and
how books can be published electronically, but in the meantime there is
a short list of epublishers, or why not contact
kobweb for more details?
Last Updated:26-July-2000