[Worldwalker]

Responding kind of backwards here:

You're looking at the margins, but not the total cost. The things you have to factor into it include the cost of setting up an ecommerce website, arranging for payment processing, the cut the payment processor will take, advertising and marketing, etc. You also have to consider the effect of different sales channels on your total sales.

From your postings so far, I get the impression that your skills are in areas other than the technical, so you probably won't have an easy time of it building the website yourself. It takes a lot more expertise to build a website than to build an ebook. So the odds are that you're either going to have to pay someone to build you a website, pay for an out-of-the-box ecommerce package, or spend a lot of time learning how to do it yourself, which means all that time you're learning how to build websites, you're not actually selling books, or writing new books to sell. Does it make more sense to re-invent the wheel, or go down to the hardware store and buy one?

Then there's the payment issue: How are people going to pay you? That's another whole can of worms, and they're very large and squirmy worms. The more types of payment you can accept, the more people you can sell books to -- but also the more complicated and expensive the whole project becomes. Add some international borders and currency exchange rates in there and some of those worms start to bite.

Having people pay for books and then wait for you to email them their books is, bluntly, not going to work. For one thing, ebook purchases are often an impulse thing, especially with a new or unknown author. Buyers want to have their book in their hands right away, not some time tomorrow morning. They bought the book because they wanted to read it -- NOW! Internet commerce is international, so people in other time zones might want to buy your book when you're asleep.

Also, there's the matter of trust. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog -- or an honest person. If I buy a book from O'Reilly Media, I know it will be delivered, it will be as advertised, and they won't randomly charge my CC for a trip to Aruba. If I buy a book from Fred's Online Bookstore & Sausage Factory, I have no clue what I'm getting, whether I'm really getting it, and what Fred is going to do with my CC info. So I'm not only more likely to buy from O'Reilly than Fred, but I'm also willing to pay more for a book from them because I don't have the same feeling of risk. Selling through a known online bookseller instead of on your own website helps with the whole trust issue. This translates to more sales and higher prices.

Mind you, I'm not saying you can't build your own website and start selling books. That's what I do -- building websites, I mean, not selling books -- and I'm self-taught. But it took me a decade of self-teaching to get where I am now, and if what you want to do is sell books, not websites, that may not be the most efficient use of your time.

Now, on to the technical issues:

Are you sure you exported the proper format? Double-check this, because it seems like the most likely source of your friend's problem. (for starters, check the file extension in wherever you exported it to)

Ask your friend how exactly he tried loading them, and what kind of error messages he got.

Also, you can test them locally. Amazon has Kindle-format reading software for the PC, Mac, iPad, and a few other platforms. Go grab the appropriate flavor and see if you can read the file.

If you can't, and you're sure you've got the right flavor of file, post exactly what steps you took, and what messages you got back, and I'll be better able to diagnose the problem.