Quote:
Originally Posted by pittendrigh
I'll look into Readium as a server. PDF is an abomination. In my not so humble opinion.
Ah. OK. I looked at your readium link to an epub. Interesting. I (for better or for worse) want my "book" to appear as the contents of a DIV, in addition to some minimal global navigation back to a surrounding website as a whole--without using an IFRAME. It might be possible. I'll look into that. That would solve my problem. Thank you! Good suggestion.
Someone else above asked "how is your book coming?" Quite well. Bits and pieces released in my niche circles have already been gaining attention. Other pieces have been published and well received in traditional glossy magazine format. The trouble with traditional magazines is they're dying out. They've been hit so hard by the internet they now pay the same money per article (to authors) as they did in the 1990s. "Instructions to authors" for magazine writers now often require articles to half as long as 20 years ago. Print costs are up, audiences are down and advertising is sparse. The times they are a changing.
By the way...........I've sold close to 3000 how to build a boat instruction sets, complete with digital blueprints over the years. Book like format would help my already existing format. I doubt more than 5% of my existing customers have an ebook reader already installed. If that many.
Here's a punchline: Years ago I had my entire "how to build a boat" offerings hidden behind a password barrier. Then I made the pages all public, with only the blueprints (dimensions and diagrams) hidden behind a password barrier. My sales shot up like a bottle rocket. People would read the free pages and then get hooked. Then they bought a password to see the rest.
A book in HTML website format, that looked and acted much like an epub with a reader, would do the same. The vast majority of all surfers still have no ebook reader installed. If they stumble across a website that looks like a book, offering most but not all of the book for free, they'll be more likely to spend some money to buy the entire book. At which point they could read it any way they like.
My 20 years experience with blueprints and how to build a boat instructions tells me an expanded audience for sample pages is the best sales technique there is.
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You are right on one part of your statement. Yes, the sample pages are a good marketing technique. That is because very few people will just buy something they haven't seen. Especially if it is more than $3.
I personally think you are limiting your potential.
And I must ask, how do you know what your customers have or don't have?
Have you asked them all?
Oh now one other question, will a buyer be able to access your book if there is no wifi handy?