An e-book publisher's general view

[Chrism]

Hi,
I'm new to this forum so please excuse any protocol lapse here. My business is publishing sportscar buying guides. There are 63 of them and they have been sold as A4-size PDF documents off a web site (www.sportscarguides.com) and through Amazon via LightningSource. The e-books have lots of pictures, are 15-30 pages in size and are priced at £5.00 or £8.00 (for Ferrari guides).

I assume readers/buyers of our books have PCs. They can print the books but, unless they have colour printers, will only be able to see the colour e-book on screen.

I'm not interested in small format (smaller than PC/notebook) e-book readers. Our books need the PC's screen real-estate.

I'm not interested in hot-links or embedded audio or video files. I just want a digital version of a paper book.

As a publisher e-books are great because:-

1. I lay them out with Quark and don't need a layout designer, a picture editor or a sub editor or a proof reader. We do all that ourselves - two of us.
2. We don't need a printer and don't need to pay to print paper books, store them or transport them.
3. Our e-books can be updated fast and often are.
4. Delivery to users is, in theory, fast and simple.
5. The Adobe PDF format is a godsend because it is widely available with a free reader.
6. We're not interested in DRM particularly. Our view is that e-books should be cheapish and sold to niche markets. We trust our readers not to copy and distribute.

LightningSource were good but had disadvantagews. They pay us in dollars which we have to convert to sterling and so lose money.

But they took a 30-40% discount. Mobipocket want 50%.

Amazon is the biggest book retailer on the 'net. We have to be in their catalogue to Mobipocket has us by the b*lls.

Chris.

[NatCh]

Hello, Chrism, welcome to the forum!

You may find yourself besieged with questions because a lot of us, as readers, try to guess at what goes through a publisher's mind.

One thing we've kicked around a lot is the question of just what sort of cost differential there is between a paper book and an e-book. Can you tell us what sort of percentage of a paper book's cost is tied up in imprint costs? And for what size a print run? I realize that your experience might not be representative, but most of what we've had to go on so far has been largely guesswork, so any enlightenment you could give would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!