Question for this group. How do you feel about a book in a PDF format and
how do you feel about buying eBooks vs paper based books. Check out
http://www.ebooktech.com/ which provides a way to publish and buy books in
PDF format. Here is an interesting argument about eBooks from another
mailing list I am member of.

 "Paper is dead." As some of you know, my new project is an "eBookstore"
devoted to technical books in eBook form. (Shameless plug: it's at
www.eBooksTech.com) I even license titles from some of the publishers on
this list. Here is some of the things I have learned from my customers, both
from sales data and from asking randomly about their purchases:
** Virtually all purchasers print out a copy of the book (we enable a
limited number of copies to be printed). I have yet to talk to a customer
who hasn't printed out the majority of the eBook they purchased. Almost none
of our customers read an eBook in a linear start-to-finish fashion on their
PC; most cite poor screen resolution and the "unnaturalness" of reading from
a monitor as reasons for not doing so.

** eBooks are favored when trying to find a specific reference by using
the full-text search and retrieval functionality we include in our eBooks.
Our customers don't read eBooks; they "use" them as search tools.

** Our best selling eBooks are all engineering-level (BSEE/BSCS) titles.
Lower-level titles on Visual Basic, etc., sell poorly in eBook form. This
leads me to believe that professionals (like engineers) who are already
accustomed to using .PDF documents readily accept eBooks, but the average
computer book purchaser is not yet ready for them. We may have to wait until
we have an entire generation that learned to read off a monitor before we
have a true mass market for eBooks.

** Of all the large publishers, only John Wiley (in the person of Kelly
Franklin) really has a clue about the potential and pitfalls of eBooks.
McGraw-Hill, the Pearson companies, etc., are hopeless. You only have to
look at the fiasco M-H ran into with the now-defunct Reciprocal to know what
I mean. To me, the real advantage of eBooks is that you can cut out the
intermediaries between the publisher and reader (like, say, Ingram!) and I
can't figure out why someone like M-H thought you had to replicate the print
book distribution model for electronic titles.

** eBooks can be substantially enhanced over print versions. Starting
with .PDF files, you can embed audio and video files, routines written in
scripting languages, supporting software, hyperlinks to web sites, etc.
There is much work to do here; any authors bold enough to go the eBook-only
route with a new work instead of print?

** The fact that all of our customers print out the eBooks they order
makes me suspect print-on-demand technology maybe has a bigger future than
we suspect. When you look at the economics of book publishing, you're struck
at what a large percentage of the revenue stream is consumed by physical
transport and handling---shipping, warehousing, returns, etc.---of the
printed books and what a paltry percentage of the revenues actually makes it
back to the author and publisher who create the book. I suspect---or maybe I
should say I hope---that one day P-O-D machines will be in every Kinko's,
Office Depot, Wal-Mart, etc., and books can be downloaded to and printed at
such locations. The economics of publishing will be better for authors and
publishers once Ingram, Braun-Brumfeld, PublishersGroup West, etc., are all
factored out of the equation.

** Paper isn't going to die any time soon with books. Paper is not
subject to disk crashes, low battery power, viruses, OS bugs, or related
things. I think it easier to read a book in the bathroom than to use my Dell
notebook (I suspect others feel the same way). And a lot of people like it!
Where paper will really be hurt is when it comes to materials of high time
value that we normally don't save, like newspapers. I dropped my
subscription to the NY Times a couple of years and now just read it on-line,
and the LA Times is going to get a similar treatment when my paid-up
subscription expires.
The current publishing environment is tough, but there will be many
opportunities ahead for those who can weather the storm.
---------------------------------------------------------
Harry Helms
Co-founder, LLH Technology Publishing
Now Part of the Elsevier Science & Technical Book Group

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