One of the things I’ve been planning with regard to our upcoming Pinebox anthology is getting it out not only in print, but also in more mainstream e-book distribution channels.
As an RPG e-book publisher, to date our books have been available through online RPG retailers. Without exception, the RPG publishing world has standardized on the PDF format. Considering the amount of formating and layout that goes into many RPG books, it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately (for us), most books require much less formatting and so in the rest of the e-book world, PDF is one of the least popular formats.
To get into these non-game distribution channels, one of the first steps is to offer the work in a format they (and our customers) can use. This means eschewing all the fancy graphics of our full-production PDFs, but even more, it means figuring out how to handle sidebars and tables in file formats that handle these kinds of elements clunkily at best. For starters, we’ll be extracting our text from the layout program and saving it as rich text (RTF format). If it doesn’t look good as an RTF, then that’s our first hurdle.
But far from the last.
Remember, all of this work is about getting our books into new distribution channels. Let’s talk about those channels.
Amazon Kindle – From a business standpoint, the Kindle has a lot going for it. Getting and reading books is easy, because Amazon owns each step of the supply chain. On the downside, your Kindle books are locked with DRM and only readable your Kindle or your Kindle iPhone app. Still, it has momentum behind it that can’t be ignored. As a publisher, we get 35% of each sale.
Ingram Digital – Ingram owns, among other divisions, Lightning Source (the POD service) and Ingram Books, the book wholesaler. Ingram Digital provides file conversion to DRM’d formats and distribution to retailers.
Fictionwise is one of the largest e-book stores on the internet and were just bought by Barnes & Nobel a few weeks ago. According to their website, publishers keep fifty percent (50%) of the sale price or twenty-five percent (25%) of the list price, whichever is greater. Fictionwise sells “secure” formats like eReader and Sony’s LTF, but they also sell DRM-free editions from publishers who elect to do so. I’ve already put in an application for 12 to Midnight, but no response yet. If we can get in directly with Fictionwise, we’ll elect to sell books in their DRM-free multi-format. Multi-format just means that the same book is made available DRM-free in about a dozen different formats. If, for some reason, they don’t want to deal with RPG books, then we still might be able to get on their store by the back door using Ingram to produce our books in eReader format. One important thing to note about Fictionwise is that they sell books that can be read on Stanza, one of the two very popular e-book reading programs available for the iPhone.
Other services are still under consideration. I’ll post an update as I have time to do more research…
I find it both promising and frustrating that e-products are at their current stage.
Things like the Kindle and iPhone open up all sorts of possibilities for electronic media to grow beyond home computers. The downside is the actual number of people who make use of the technology. Especially in RPG circles, where PDFs are a mainstay, I’m continually baffled by those who believe an RPG product is not “real” unless it’s in print.
I guess the best we can do is get our product out by as many different avenues as possible and hope for the best.
It has been postulated that we may be approaching a tipping point with regard to ebooks. The Kindle and the the iPhone are making ebooks more mainstream. It didn’t hurt that Oprah gushed over how much she loves her Kindle.
The iPhone, in particular, seems to hold a lot of promise for ebooks. The free Stanza reader has been downloaded more than 200,000 times on the iPhone. It’s a pretty good app and the reading experience isn’t bad, but I’m not interested in running down my phone battery by using it to read a book. I like my Sony eReader just fine.
That being said, I’m frustrated with the state of e-books too. Ebooks are great for reading, but not so great for using. By that, I mean it’s a pretty satisfactory experience to sit down and read an ebook from beginning to end. It is a much more frustrating experience to try to “flip” through a book to find just the page you need. Most formats are fine for straight prose, but navigation and use is still a problem for technical, non-linear information. Not so ironically, the whipping boy of the ebook world–PDF–is still the best format for that kind of presentation. It’s easy to add bookmarks as a user, and publishers can present complex information in a more meaningful manner.
Hmm, you know what would make flipping through a book easier in terms of looking for the passage you need? An automated set of cliff-notes style plot summarizations, each hyperlinking into the page/subchapter/chapter that they talk about.
I know that when I’m flipping through a book looking for something, I’m not just remember about where in the book the thing is, I’m scanning the pages I open randomly to and associating where the plot on that page is in relation to where the in the plot my thing is that I’m looking for, then flipping the page either forward or back to narrow it down.
With a plot outline included as an index or glossary, could this be more easily accomplished?
It all depends on the software/device you’re using. On my Sony prs-505, I get around by using links in the table of contents and bookmarks.
In my opinion, we need another generation or two of software and hardware before non-linear navigation becomes as easy as flipping through a book. It’s possible that when Plastic Logic’s e-reader comes out early next year, the system you describe would be perfect. That screen will be touch-sensitive, so accessing hyperlinks won’t be as clunky as “tabbing” through links using the device’s buttons like we have to do today.