Since the “moderators” on the Publish-L newsgroup wouldn’t allow this post unless the correct descriptions of certain companies were removed, I have posted it here.

eBooks are pretty useless for any information which requires more than one font, an image, or anything resembling formatting. I have had many “professional” services attempt to convert books from “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series into ebook format and the final product was a useless puddle of bits.

The current “industry standard” is to use EPUB. I’m sure EPUB will succeed because like PDF, it is the poorest possible choice for a “standard”. Industry leaders and MBAs alike always embrace the poorest possible decision. The EPUB format we have now will not be compatible with the EPUB format we will use in 2011. The standard was rushed and from an IT/Geek standpoint it is bad bad bad bad unforgivably bad. Even Microsoft, father of most bad things to hit IT in the past 20 years, hasn’t written a poorer specification.

In this economy, people who spend $300+ on a reader are going to spend the bulk of their time reading through the 200,000+ “free” titles which come “bundled” with the reader. Unless there is _specific_ information they need from a book you have put out only in EPUB format, they aren’t going to spend any money on an EPUB format. “If” you happen to have a novel or other “lit” type book which happens to be getting a weekly mention on both Oprah and CNN (think “High on Arrival”) you will see “some” eReader owners plunking down cash on it.

Most books will be “zero value” which get put out via EPUB format. The readers are currently being hawked as portals to this large free library. Most marketers for the devices are also promising to continue expanding the “free” library. In less than two years each eReader supporting the EPUB format will have in excess of one million titles available for “free”. There are currently over 200,000 “classics” available. Each year there will be a new round of books which fall off the copyright protection merry go round plus there will be a new batch of books cranked out by publishers/authors which are released “free” in EPUB format.

Some of the new “free” books will be released in their entirety, and others will be released as a group of chapters. Those of you who think the current tech weenies will continue to be appeased by “first chapter free” sites are smoking something that isn’t sold over the counter. I have one technical book I will be releasing for free in PDF format once it has gone through editing. This will be the entire book. Due to the horrible limitations of EPUB, it will not be released in EPUB format. The book supports/covers an OpenSource Java class library which currently has over 5000 users/downloaders on SourceForge. The PDF will be bundled with the next major release of the library so new developers will have a much easier time getting up to speed with the library. Why did I spend 4 months of my time writing the book? I needed to use the library for a project and there wasn’t a single stitch of usable documentation. Why would I give such a book away for free? OpenSource users pay for nothing. Period. If it has anything to do with an OpenSource project on SourceForge, they expect it to be free and will simply look for a different library or tool rather than pay for a book. The book, however, is another book in “The Minimum You Need to Know” series. The rest of the series doesn’t cover OpenSource libraries from SourceForge. When the PDF gets bundled with the next downloadable update, I will have 5000+ developers that are now familiar with “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series. It may be two weeks or five years, but eventually they will need information on one of the topics covered by the series. If they liked the book they got for free, they will first look at my book series because they “know” it.

My current novel “Infinite Exposure” has been released in eBook form. I give away the first 18 chapters in both EPUB and PDF format. That version ends with a paragraph explaining that the readers have been reading a promotional version and they must purchase a retail version to find out how the book ends. Those who are curious enough about the book will spend the money. $4 for the eBook version or $24 for the hard cover (there will never be a paperback version.) Once you upload a “free” PDF version of your book to a couple of the “free” book sites you will find a strange thing happens. Set up a Google or other monitor for your title and have it send you updates. Every couple of weeks I find a new “free” book site has not only the PDF copy of the book, but has taken the time to either scrape and paste reviews of the book onto their site, or to provide links to book reviews. Some of the sites are kind enough to provide some kind of download count information. The “I want everything for free” crowd appears to number in the hundreds of thousands, if the counters are accurate. How many were simply download bots as opposed to actual people reading? No idea. When was the last time any of you put out a marketing packet/kit which was willingly _pulled_ 100,000 or more times? I’ll wager many of you paid money to send marketing out via one or more email marketing services only to see no sales and be completely unable to verify the hit counts they were sending to you in the weekly emails. I spent about half an hour chopping the novel off at a logical point, generating the PDF, and uploading it to two sites. Every couple of weeks I find it listed somewhere else. More importantly though, I find the glowing reviews listed along with it.

Microsoft, a company which has produced absolutely worthless software for decades, has trained most people to accept “good enough” as the way it is. Hell, Microsoft has to have years of great days all back to back along with the alignment of critical star configurations in order to have a product which can aspire to be “good enough”. Anybody who has had to endure pathetic products like Word, Windows, Vista, (the we are gonna charge you for these bug fixes Windows 7 “release”), Bob, Money, or the countless other “products” pushed out the door by Microsoft has found their attitude adjusting towards “good enough” being a forward looking goal rather than a fall back position.

The only publishers I see making anything at all out of the current EPUB trend are the publishers with a “long tail.” This “tail” can extend both forward and backward, if you happen to have some kind of trademarked series such as my “The Minimum You Need to Know” or, as other publishers have with “for dummies”, “for idiots”, etc. (I haven’t checked lately, but I believe “for Complete MBAs” is still available. That would cover dummies, idiots, and Godless genetic misfits without infringing on the other trademarks.) I expect it will take up to a year for all 5000+ current users of that OpenSource library to pull down updates. I haven’t done much tracking to see how many new adopters are coming along, but there are continued improvements to the library, so there will be at least a trickle of new users each year. Every copy of my $45-$90 titles which goes out the door after the release will pretty much be payback for the time I put into generating this marketing material. Note that I didn’t write the book specifically to be a marketing tool. I had to do the research anyway, so why not do just a little bit more and write a book? The application I was going to write got done inside of four months instead of one month, but it got done, and I wasn’t on a delivery schedule.

Roland Hughes, President

Logikal Solutions

http://www.logikalsolutions.com

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com

http://www.infiniteexposure.net