The Future For Publishing.

For some time now I have been exploring the possibility of converting all of my published books into E-books that can be sold and downloaded from the internet in much the same way that music tracks are sold and downloaded by millions of people already all over the world. It has also been my intention to dramatically reduce the price of each book offered for sale, but because of the low price per book, and the complexity of setting up a system to cope with all of the difficulties associated with selling downloads, I have been unable to set up my own sales facilities. Amazon were the first big retailer to sell E-Books as downloads, but now they have an important rival in the shape of Google whom I have opted to make my books available through. When a normal paper copy of a book is ordered online it can be days before you get it, but with E-books, payment is made on line and the sale is instantaneous with the download instantaneous as well. There is no waiting for the postman, or for the order to be processed.

The books are offered by Google as a single file for each book. With most people on Broadband, downloads only take a few seconds for each book or they can be held online in their own books account. Each of the files (Books) is locked to prevent editing or tampering. The project is at an early stage, in the UK and has only just started operating this year. Now that everything is up and running I have included two new titles in the range that have not previously been published in any other form and it is my hope that in the future I will be able to add more titles to the range in a similar fashion.

P.S. It may be of interest to some people that there are many E-Book file conversion programs available on the Net, so it should be possible to adapt any E-Book, to any book reader, no matter how obscure the reader is. My advice would to be wary of free downloads though and this type of activity may also infringe some copyrights!

See also an old article  Electronic Books War.