Dean Takahashi is the author of
The Xbox 360 Uncloaked:The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console, and he has made it available through his publisher Spiderworks in both paperback and e-book form.
In an article,
Why Write an E-book? he explains some of the advantages of an e-book. He was not sure about it at first, as I'm sure many authors are not yet comfortable, but he found that it is a technology that is here to stay and calls it a disruptive technology. It's a very thoughtful and interesting article, not quite as shallow as many that we see. Using his words from the article put into bullet points, he says that...
* The most vital factor was speed.
Other authors of hardcover books have told me that they had to finish their book as much as a year before it was in the bookstores. They had go through editing, await the bookseller buying process, set up a marketing plan, and then distribute the books into stores.
* The eBook can be updated with no extra costs.
If I find that many more sources come out of the woodworks, then I can incorporate their material into the book and resend it to the publisher. Printed books have to be reprinted and obsolete editions have to be returned, incurring shipping charges.
* You don’t have to worry about killing trees with eBooks.
* There’s no cost associated with shipping an eBook
* As a customer, you just pay with a credit card and download it to your computer. You get immediate gratification, compared to waiting for an online book seller to ship it to you.
* With the eBook, I was able to use more than 50 full-color photos. That would have been cost prohibitive in the paper version, which has black-and-white versions.
* You can embed hyperlinks in an eBook so that a reader can click on it live and visit that site immediately.
* You can quickly access the material in a nonlinear way, such as clicking on a chapter in the table of contents so you can move to that chapter quickly.
But he also points out some disadvantages like:
* Not everyone wants to read them on a computer.
<I'd say they should try a handheld or a nice e-ink book reader!>
* You can reach wider numbers of people, particularly casual purchasers, in a bookstore.
If you are interested in the book be sure to grab a copy... preferably the e-book version, even if it is in .pdf. They offer a
sample for you to check it out before buying.