Quote:
Originally Posted by Freeshadow
@sigilbear
Exactly. What you called "tell[ing] the stories behind their creation" is what I referred to as heraldry - the lore of flags, state symbols, coat of arms etc. This is why I said unless a book IS offering such an in-depth coverage on the subject matter, nobody seriously interested would care because for a quick basic lookup there are sites like symbols.com
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But I think it's also important to keep in mind that comparing books an websites is kind of like comparing apples and oranges. If a person writes a book about Topic X and someone comes along puts that same information on the Internet, it will probably hurt the book's sales. However, I suspect some people would still buy the book.
They could include people who would like to have a copy they can read even when they're offline. Some may simply prefer a book format, and some may not even be aware of other sources; I wasn't even aware that symbols.com now has information about state symbols.
I'd love to write a book that sells a million copies, but I'm not going to complain if I only sell 100 copies direct or 300 through Amazon and iBooks. What's intriguing about epubs is the economics. With traditional paper books, you had to shell out thousands of dollars in order to print a few thousand books - just to test the waters.
In contrast, you can create an epub virtually free of charge and make a profit merely by targeting a tiny community of people who have a special interest in a particular topic.
I thought there were two major state symbols sites existing side by side, but there are actually THREE, including symbols.com. Wikipedia also has a lot of information about symbols.
Or consider a topic like elephants. You can probably find a hundred books about elephants - books for adults or children; coffee table books with spectacular books and ancient books that recount adventures with elephants in past centuries.
All these books exist side by side in its own niche.