Joy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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ebooks2011-05-03 11:51 am
wide_worlds_joy) wrote in ebooks2011-05-03 11:51 am
Kicking around an idea
Inspired by elf's posts on electronic books, I'm thinking seriously about starting a company that will sell ebooks at a very reasonable price, like $3-$5 each, with about 1/3 to 1/2 going to the author. These would be high quality common formats. PDF, TXT, RTF, possibly even HTML, with no DRM on them.
The questions I have are these:
1) do you think this would be a good service?
2) if you had this available would you use it?
3) if you were an author, would you put your books up to be sold this way?
4) Are there any other common and cross-platform formats I need?
5) would you be willing to help convert/proofread books into those formats?
ETA: Okay, obviously I'm not the professional marketer that I think, so let me bore you all some more.
Yes, I would be paying others to do proofreading/editing. No, I would not be publishing unknown works. My idea is to contact some of the authors I know, see if they would be willing to let me have the epub rights to older books of theirs, that their publisher may not be interested in printing more copies of (Mercedes Lackey and her "Diana Tregarde" series spring to mind). The authors retain all rights to their work. ALL this would be doing is providing inexpensive, well formatted versions of those books for reading on e-devices. The author would write the book, it would be published through their normal print publisher. Several years later when the interest has waned, but the author still has their copyrights to it, I would take the book, put it into an e-format such as above (including epub apparently) and provide that to those who want to buy it.
It would be something like the "used book store" where you can get copies of old favorite books and read them again without having to pay $18 for it from Amazon. In that it is using older books, $1 to $3 per book royalties to the author isn't a small amount, considering that currently used books don't generate anything for the author, and all they are doing is sitting on their manuscript.
*I* or my employees would be doing the linking, the formatting for HTML, PDF and other formats, including the pictures and diagrams, converting it between the various formats and making sure that it converted properly. No OCR and throw it into the web, but checking it against the manuscript to make sure.
I would have to hire a programmer to make a kick-ass search engine for the site, but I have someone in mind for that. Cross links, links to other sites and so on would also be done by the company. Promotion as well. Naturally I'd have to have an attorney to help with the legal issues.
I'd like "cheap-ebooks.com" to be more than a fly by night internet bubble dot com. I'd like it to have saying power like YouTube or something similar.
elf's posts on electronic books, I'm thinking seriously about starting a company that will sell ebooks at a very reasonable price, like $3-$5 each, with about 1/3 to 1/2 going to the author. These would be high quality common formats. PDF, TXT, RTF, possibly even HTML, with no DRM on them.The questions I have are these:
1) do you think this would be a good service?
2) if you had this available would you use it?
3) if you were an author, would you put your books up to be sold this way?
4) Are there any other common and cross-platform formats I need?
5) would you be willing to help convert/proofread books into those formats?
ETA: Okay, obviously I'm not the professional marketer that I think, so let me bore you all some more.
Yes, I would be paying others to do proofreading/editing. No, I would not be publishing unknown works. My idea is to contact some of the authors I know, see if they would be willing to let me have the epub rights to older books of theirs, that their publisher may not be interested in printing more copies of (Mercedes Lackey and her "Diana Tregarde" series spring to mind). The authors retain all rights to their work. ALL this would be doing is providing inexpensive, well formatted versions of those books for reading on e-devices. The author would write the book, it would be published through their normal print publisher. Several years later when the interest has waned, but the author still has their copyrights to it, I would take the book, put it into an e-format such as above (including epub apparently) and provide that to those who want to buy it.
It would be something like the "used book store" where you can get copies of old favorite books and read them again without having to pay $18 for it from Amazon. In that it is using older books, $1 to $3 per book royalties to the author isn't a small amount, considering that currently used books don't generate anything for the author, and all they are doing is sitting on their manuscript.
*I* or my employees would be doing the linking, the formatting for HTML, PDF and other formats, including the pictures and diagrams, converting it between the various formats and making sure that it converted properly. No OCR and throw it into the web, but checking it against the manuscript to make sure.
I would have to hire a programmer to make a kick-ass search engine for the site, but I have someone in mind for that. Cross links, links to other sites and so on would also be done by the company. Promotion as well. Naturally I'd have to have an attorney to help with the legal issues.
I'd like "cheap-ebooks.com" to be more than a fly by night internet bubble dot com. I'd like it to have saying power like YouTube or something similar.
no subject
Harder stuff is "decide on CSS details with enough variation that all your books don't wind up looking identical," but that's still potentially part of setup arrangements. (And it's a "you decide" thing.)
Dealing with someone else's scans is a nightmare. Dealing with "the only known copy of this book is a 1963 collector's edition paperback with a crumbling spine; DO NOT DAMAGE the original" is a nightmare. Dealing with color-coded maps on yellowing paper is trouble. Dealing with "so, what do you do when the author hasn't paid you yet?" is icky, especially if you know how tight a budget the author's working under.
I've put serious thought into "could I do this as a business," and eventually came up with, "probably, but the first four months would be borderline-starvation, and ick, I'd have to run a business." I'm currently looking for someone else who wants to run an ebook conversion business and will hire me to do formatting & OCR corrections, and the occasional weird image-editing job.
no subject
I imagine working with physical copies has it's own set of challenges as you aptly described here!
Then there is the business aspect. I keep running into my own not so great communication skills. I can't sell water to a man dying of thirst in a desert. Though, if I were to get fired, I'd give this option more consideration.
A lot of it does seem to be going out and drumming up some business. However, after reading many blogs and talking to other authors not many people have the necessary skills needed to create a well crafted ebook. Sure there are programs that can help but if you don't know how to read CSS I don't know how a person would get fine control over the illustrations in the document.
I've also found that depending on what platform you're reading the ebook on the formatting elements don't always carry over. It's incredibly frustrating. That and all the different formats have their own quirks. I code everything for epub because mobi and lrf are more forgiving in terms of what codes you use to center images and etc...
I think I now know why so many author's just use the tools at Smashwords and Kindle to upload their ebook. It seems much easier than learning how to create the ebook from scratch.
But I've read that those tools don't always produce the nicest looking ebooks. I can see that there is probably a need for help with these types of services but my strong suit seems to be more technical than managerial. (having said that managers do tend to make the most money)