New England Press, Boston, Ma. Home of the e-book

In Memoriam:

Robert Ramos, Journalist, Katapat newspaper, Laguna, Philippines.
Born: November 24, 1965
Died: November 20, 2005, at the public market at Cabuyao, Laguna.

Benefits of e-books for Authors.

(Along with some drawbacks.)

With e-books, authors can easily publish their literary works and market them to a wide audience. For the aspiring author with a PC (either desktop or notebook) and Word 2000 or later, Read in Microsoft Reader allows you to make e-books from your Word program. Even without it, there are still web sites that will allow you to publish an e book in .LIT (the file format that Microsoft Reader uses) format. It is truly straightforward to publish an e-book. You still need to do work, and the more work you do as an author, the better your e-book will be...and the better your chances of having it sold to lots of people. It is said that over half of all U.S. households now owns a personal computer. That's in excess of 125 million families that now own a PC, and many of them are hooked up to the Internet (find out exact figures on the number of people that have Internet access.). No less than 40% of America's households are now connected to the Internet, and that number continues to grow. Even if your house isn't hooked up to the Internet, your employer is most likely hooked up to the Internet today.

The biggest benefits of e-books? They can be offered at a very low price. Because it costs almost nothing to produce an e-book (except for what you invest in the computer and perhaps the encryption software necessary for making an encrypted e-book), they can be sold very cheaply, and the author can still make a profit. You're most likely to have expenses in the e-commerce portion of your business. No matter if you sell your book at Amazon.com, or your own website and accept credit cards, the processor is going to take their cut, and that is how the price floor is going to be determined. At Amazon.com, 99 cents is charged for each sale, plus 15% of the listed price. The price you sell your e-book is going to be influenced by how much your e-commerce solution charges you for each sale you make. While you want to price your book according to both perceived value and the amount of profit you seek to make with each sale, one of the best way to combat illegal coyping is to make the original available at as low a price as practical, so that anyone who wants the e-book can afford to buy the e-book. It promises to be the low-price solution for libraries and others, who are strapped for cash, and those who are looking for a more inexpensive fix for their reading habit.

This is the most inexpensive way of breaking into publishing today...assuming you already have a PC. Even if you don't have a PC, the prices now are low. A good computer can be had, starting at $300.00; a far cry from when a cheap computer meant it wasn't good enough to go on the Internet with.

There is one drawback...actually, several. E-books still aren't terribly popular among the majority of readers in the U.S. Most people still don't know what an e-book is (although this Website is designed to help change that!), and most still might be reluctant to buy an e-book, even if they have a computer at home, because they're still used to paper books. E-books still don't sell that much; you are considered successful if your e-book sell 2,000 copies or so. However, I also believe you can sell large numbers of e-books; it just hasn't happened yet for a number of reasons, including the ones I've mentioned above. Stephen King showed the publishing world that a self-published e-book could be sold in large quantities (Note the success of The Plant, which sold for $1.00 on a suggested contribution, and grossed over $100,000.00. The Plant was discontinued because people were downloading the book without paying for it; from some estimates, about 400,000 people downloaded the book, which means that about 25% of the readers paid. It also means that 300,000 people didn't pay for the privilege of the read. That's a lot of money to lose like that.). In all, about a million e-books were sold in 2002; that represents substantial growth over the past 2 years. That figure represents about 10-15 million dollars in gross sales. Of course...I still haven't stated the obvious—in order to read an e-book, you still need either a handheld reader or a PC, and there is the matter of the batteries if the reader is portable...!! Copyright and illegal copying of the e-book were such big issues, that e-books didn't develop until very recently. There was no way to prevent people from simply copying the files and distributing it to whomever they wanted. It is a concern to me, and it should be for people who want to use Microsoft's RMR software to manufacture e-books; there is no encryption provided. For that, you have to either rely on an outsider, or buy a very expensive software package that provides e-book encryption. Microsoft's Enterprise package goes for nearly $10,000.00; Adobe's solution for making PDF e-books goes for $10,000.00. It cheaper to go to a place like Content Express and have your e-book assembled and encrypted, if that's the way you want to go.

As for me...I'll go for accessibility, for now.

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Benefits of e-books for Authors.

(Along with some drawbacks.)