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Old 05-16-2006, 05:08 PM   #1
Bob Russell
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Why write an e-book? An author provides answers

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.
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Old 05-17-2006, 02:12 AM   #2
Robert Marquard
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* The eBook can be updated with no extra costs.

Do we really want "Moby Dick 2.1" with the entirely new character Qeequeg? (this one from Dr Dobbs magazine many years ago)
Not to mention "Did Han Solo shoot first or not?".
Revisions for a tech manual are ok, but for literature it is really bad.
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Old 05-17-2006, 06:13 AM   #3
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Yeah I agree randomly changing a work is annoying and generally pointless in any medium (Star Wars, the original lot, come to mind here).

But there are times when updating a fiction, to fix a problem, would be good though.

One book I brought in Hardcover a year or so ago was so badly edited that characters names were spelt differently almost every time they appeared and simple typos hadn't been corrected.
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