[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Further to market share, the wisdom seems to be that Amazon has 60 percent of all e-book sales (I suspect that's in the United States, not worldwide) but that self-pubbers do better than that on Amazon because it's search engine is better and its customers are accustomed to searching for books rather than simply following the advertisements in the NYT, NYRB, or TNY, where self-pubbers can't afford to play. Over the past five years (before 2010 there was no effective competition outside Sony, and self-pubbers weren't accommodated on the Sony platform) I have consistently sold 80 percent of my books on Amazon, 20 percent on B&N, Apple, and elsewhere. Every once in a while there will be a change in this ratio, but over the long run it has always returned to 80/20.

You know, that guy at the KDP forums keeps blathering on about that 60-something-percent figure as if it's apodictic. It's not. It's just blather. Nobody KNOWS what the real numbers are, and they never will. I have clients that sell internationally, in big numbers; and national bestsellers, as well, and not one of them thinks it's 60-something. They all think it's 88-92%, and yes, they all sell on Sony, Apple's iBooks, etc.

I began using the DTP (as it was then known) toward the end of November 2007, which I think was the first month it was available. I uploaded Word docs, then (certainly as early as 2009) zipped html, and finally (at your suggestion, bless you) epub, I think at the start of 2012.

Yup, I remember.

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Do these students have the Kindle apps installed ?

And to carry on the conversation, here's a Gutenberg book (all text) that I consider well-formatted

The Grateful Dead by Gordon Hall Gerould

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39408

clickable TOC and clickable endnotes and clickable index.

Well...it's a perfectly serviceable book, if not very visual, in terms of formatting. It has the basic fundamentals; it has a TOC/Index; it has two-way footnote links; I will say that the font seems to be very, very dark on the Voyage. It also has some oddball light red underscores, the meaning or purpose of which aren't apparent to me. I admit that from a graphic design standpoint, I'm not wild about the heavy blue chapter heads/story heads, but that's all individual taste.

I'd also note that the layout is deliberately set to align-left, which is actually in opposition to what Amazon's always indicated--and of course, once alignment is set for the body-text, the user can't override it. That would drive me bonkers.

Spoiler has some quasi-negative comments about the ePUB formatting. Now, as I consider PG to be an ENORMOUS public service, and a great bunch of people, most of these can be blithely ignored, but as this is a discussion about "good" versus "not-good" formatting...

Spoiler:

I also don't really understand the overly-complex internal structure of the ePUB. If one of my bookmakers gave me that ePUB, he wouldn't keep working for me--that, or he'd have to do some remedial training. In fairness, it's Gutenberg, and the books are bulk-produced, in essence (I donate time to DP, so...yes, I know it's not like the Smashwords Grinder, aka Calibre's API, but...not totally dissimilar, either). The CSS also badly needs cleanup. I probably wouldn't have done the Index the way it's done; if you're going to provide a linked Index, rather than a search-Index, you probably ought to have "return" links embedded, but again--that's personal choice. Most e-readers now have a back button; or someone can click to go back to the Index, but one-way links from Indices always present this set of decisions.

However, from a user's standpoint, sure...mostly, it's a perfectly serviceable ePUB.

Thanks!

Hitch