[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Dabcar

Believe me, I'd rather simply give it to Amazon, but as I mentioned in my original post, these books are written for this specific community, not for the general public.

Depends on your genres too.

This sounds like Non-Fiction, which gears more heavily towards PDFs/Print. Genres like Romance/Sci-Fi are geared more towards ebooks.

Originally Posted by Dabcar

The printed books, likewise, are distributed to specific outlets within the community, not on Amazon or any major distribution service or bookshop. If you have any suggestions here, that would be appreciated.

Learn how to use Styles in InDesign (none of this manual override crap!).

Create templates and consistent CSS across the board.

Decide on a source format and use that as your master (DOCX, InDesign, EPUB, [...]).

This would allow you to automate a lot more of the conversion, but each output format still requires unique manual finagling.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Minor nit. One acquaintance is still using an old Sony PRS-500 ereader which she never bothered to send to Sony for the update to allow EPUB so she's stuck with LRF. There's one in every crowd...

Which is why any other formats can be derived.

More obscure formats like LIT/LRF are completely abandoned by any current retailers/readers.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Also, I do hope this eBook is going to be sold without DRM.

Agreed. DRM does absolutely nothing besides hinder legitimate customers.

Plus, trying to run your own DRM servers/schemes for ebooks is extremely expensive—as in tens of thousands $ per month. (That's been discussed on MobileRead many times over the years.)

Anyway, probably best if we don't derail this entire thread into DRM... Just look up:

DRM site:mobileread.com

in your favorite search engine, and you'll find plenty of topics/discussion around it. It's been discussed to death.

Originally Posted by Dabcar

I know, if anyone wants, they can pass on an epub, but most are less inclined to do so.

I don't think there's any basis to this claim.

Originally Posted by Dabcar

The reason for not doing PDF was that many of these books will be sold. It seems that people get the idea that PDFs (even bought ones) are somehow free to distribute to others.

That will stop absolutely nothing. It's up to YOU to then supply customers with all the formats, in all the ways people want, at a reasonable price.

This is why YOU should be the one supplying it to every store you can get your hands on (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, [...]) and trying to make the customer's life as easy as possible.

Even IF there is a free version available, people are still willing to pay for ease-of-use, "one-button push", and other advantages (like syncing notes/highlights across devices).

And remember, most people are not technically savvy, and would rather just pay a reasonable fee for a "it magically shows up on my Kindle" rather than figuring out sideloading... (even though the reality is: it's as "easy" as drag/dropping).

Source: Almost all the books I work on are released under variants of the CC-BY license (as close-to-public-domain as possible), and are released for free in all 3/4 formats... along with paid versions.

Side Note: I'm also reminded of my post from a few months ago where I brought up why Amazon was dominating self-publishing... and the similar parallel with Steam+video games.

Originally Posted by Hitch

And with more all due respect, I think you have absolutely NO idea what the tech support requirements will be like. I tell people this all the time, [...] but my second largest expense [...] is unpaid tech support. And mind you, we TELL our customers that we're not tech support, we don't provide tech support.

Originally Posted by Hitch

At least 4x daily, one of my bookmakers needs me, to walk a customer through simply DOWNLOADING files. The average person apparently thinks that 'downloading" means, clicking a link in an email. If they don't have a program on their computer that will open that file, when they click it, OMG, the world will come to an end.

Didn't we also discuss this recently, where many browsers are auto-opening PDFs within the browser and causing extra headaches too?

And then in a personal email, we just ranted about Microsoft Edge's built-in EPUB Reader (which is being removed in Windows 10 2004 when Edge changes to a Chromium-backend.).

On my own customer support story from a few months ago:

I ran into firsthand confusion over Google Drive! Google Drive of all things!

My steps to the author were "simple":

1. Open my Google Drive link.
2. Download the DOCX.
3. Do your corrections, and send me back the DOCX.

Guess what happened? Total confusion.

The first screen you see when you click on the link IS NOT a download screen. It's a View + "Open in Google Docs" screen.

To any technical user, you ignore all that and click the little download button in the upper right, then download the DOCX.

I got complete chaos on my end, and had to do multiple emails back/forth to iron this out. (Not to mention if they open it on their phone... the UI is completely different from what I'm seeing.)

After I ranted to Hitch about this customer support, she warned me to DISABLE THE EDITING PERMISSIONS on the file, then send the link.

This would force Google Drive to only give the user an actual download link.

Originally Posted by Hitch

I've told this story here before--since 2010, we've had a number of professional customers, lawyers, doctors, etc., decide that they didn't want to pay Amazon, et al, so they would sell their eBooks form their own website. Right? [...]

Of all of those customers, do you know how many still do that?

NONE. Not one. Every single one gave it up because the unpaid tech support demands were so excessive that they decided that they'd much, much rather pay Amazon than have to deal with it themselves.

I was trying to find a few of those topics/posts real quick, but couldn't. Have any links to some of those posts or give a hint of what to type in search?

Originally Posted by Frizzell

I'm not sure why PDF appears to be a 'stand-offish' format, since there's hardly a tablet cell phone, PC or Mac on the planet that can't view PDFs.

PDFs are designed as a Print/"Fixed Format" format. They are great if you visually want an exact reproduction of the original... but they're absolutely dreadful for reflowability + customizability + reading on devices that are smaller than the page size (the "pan and scan" issue).

Originally Posted by Frizzell

Even Kindle reads PDF Documents,

Are you speaking from experience?

Sure, they can "read" PDFs, but the actual usability is extremely subpar.

Example: Depending on how the PDFs are created, the page turning and loading is atrociously slow.

See this post of mine from 2017 + The Digital Reader showing sluggish page turns on a Kobo Aura One.

Also, because of the small device sizes, you have to apply hackish workarounds like:

• Cropping margins (to try to fill smaller screen with the entire text box)
  
  • Can't physically shove a 8.5"x11" page into a 6" device.
    
  • Straight cropping typically breaks when dealing with left/right pages with different inner/outer margins.
• Zoom into text
  
  • Scanned text will look abysmal
    
  • Can't choose custom fonts/font sizes
• Wasted space with Headers/Footers
• Running the PDF through k2pdfopt to try to "fit" your device.

The reading experience between PDF and a proper ebook is night and day!