Best formats?

[Arkadian]

@BR and mrmikel,

my reason for getting a pdf as well is simply because I don't expect large numbers of my readers to actually own an e-reader, so they would be able to read my e-book (whin, BTW, is there to complement my niche site) on their computer. If they owned it I don't expect them to select that option.

[Ghitulescu]

I wouldn't go the PDF way.
It looks fine only on big screen devices (like computers). On small devices, like eReaders and maybe smartphones, reading a non-flowable(fixed size page, eg like image-PDFs), is a PITA to read. PDF was a format designed by Adobe for printing not reading on screens (surely, it can be read, just that its intended purpose was to be printed - in a past where paperless office was a fiction).

However, if your target customers would be people that like reading on 27" displays (or on the new Sony toy), PDF may be the way to go.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

Why would one buy something he can obtain for free?

Bleh, we release all of our books for free as EPUB + PDF, and charge for the Physical book + Kindle versions.

Just because something has no DRM and can be gotten for free, doesn't mean that people won't pay for the bundle of services that Amazon provides: convenience, ease of use, syncing location/notes to a multitude of devices, etc. etc.

While you will never stamp out piracy completely, easy to use + cheap alternatives can drive down a lot of it (see Netflix, Spotify, Amazon).

I mean heck, there are lots of people who don't know how to download a book from Project Gutenberg or MobileRead's EPUB/MOBI sections, but they sure know how to purchase that sweet $.99 version off of Amazon.

I also recommend watching this video, "Michael Masnick The Trent Reznor case study". You must CwF + RtB:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njuo1puB1lg

There are a lot of indirect benefits of giving away certain goods for free.

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Publishers who have gone DRM-free, notably Tor, have noted no decrease in sales since dropping DRM.

The different formats also become complimentary goods. Instead of me paying for multiple versions of the same book, you can grab the PDF, EPUB, MOBI no problems. I just get whatever format suits me best. Similar to Amazon bundling an ebook version with a physical purchase of a book (or offering the ebook version for a severely reduced price).

Maybe a PDF can be used if I wanted to do more serious reading/referencing page numbers, while EPUB would be for more casual reading/absorbing the ideas, or reading on the go. I see each of the formats as benefiting eachother. In our case, you are free to grab the PDF and see EXACTLY what you would be purchasing with a physical copy of the book.

The more ways you can get your book out there, the more readers can read it, the better!

Originally Posted by Arkadian

For now I have selected epub and azw3, along with the ever popular pdf.

[...]

I think that should be plenty choice... What would you say?

Yep yep, the market is pretty much MOBI (Amazon) + EPUB (B&N + everyone else). Sometimes if the book is complex, or has some very specific coding, the publishers will create another EPUB specifically for iBooks.

PDF will be a decent option for anyone else, although you would most likely have to sell/give that directly from your own site.

You might want to take a look at the MobileRead Wiki for a huge list of stores, perhaps you might find some minor players who would be able to handle PDF sales:

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_stores

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

I wouldn't go the PDF way.
It looks fine only on big screen devices (like computers). On small devices, like eReaders and maybe smartphones, reading a non-flowable(fixed size page, eg like image-PDFs), is a PITA to read.

I agree about PDF being subpar (at least for my preferences), although depending on how your sales setup is, you could always offer alternative dimensions of PDFs. An 8.5"x11" as a 'printer friendly version', 7"x10" or 6"x9" depending on how long the book is, something smaller with no/little margins for Mobile, etc. etc.

Originally Posted by Arkadian

my reason for getting a pdf as well is simply because I don't expect large numbers of my readers to actually own an e-reader, so they would be able to read my e-book (whin, BTW, is there to complement my niche site) on their computer. If they owned it I don't expect them to select that option.

You know your customers better than us. You have to decide what is best! Every situation is unique. But if you are in the US, the general advice is definitely get the book for sale on Amazon + B&N (and everywhere else that supports EPUB).

[mrmikel]

Feedbooks.com has a number of books in PDF format that look great on small readers because when they were published, they set the page size to match an ereader. When I first got my ereader I downloaded many of them because they looked good and read easily.

You know your customers better than us. You have to decide what is best! Every situation is unique.

There is no perfect format for all books. If I had readers who would use PDFs and used large devices and wanted to do tables or maps, I would go that way. For novels with simple formatting almost any format will do if executed well.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Arkadian

@BR and mrmikel,

my reason for getting a pdf as well is simply because I don't expect large numbers of my readers to actually own an e-reader, so they would be able to read my e-book (whin, BTW, is there to complement my niche site) on their computer. If they owned it I don't expect them to select that option.

Arkadian:

Do you think that your readers (human) are so non-tecchie that they would balk at downloading free e-reading software? Like ADE, or Nook for PC/Mac, or an easy-peasy one, Firefox ePUBReader?

Granted--for notetaking, the PDF may be better, IF (big "if!") your readers have something like Acrobat pro, which will allow annotation, but if they are just plain-old people, they won't have that. The ability to resize, read, etc., in something like ADE is certainly just as desktop-friendly--and just as FREE--as any widely distributed PDF reader.

Just a thought. (And, of course: one may read PDFs with it, as well, no?). I personally have no bias against PDF's, per se, as instruments for non-fiction adn reference books; I use them all the time, myself, for manuals. But if your thinking is being swayed by the idea of 'desktop reading,' don't forget that both ePUB and MOBi have free, widely available, EASILY installable desktop readers that are easily found/accessible. Hell, I've been known to even PACKAGE the installers and send them to clients.

FWIW, that's my $.02.

@mrmikel:

Being able to be read on everything occupies Hitch's attention full time and overtime, as an e book maker.

...and then some. And even then--we are not always 100% successful. When we do complex books, I know that they will work on all the MAIN readers, in the US--Kindle, ADE, iBooks, Nook, Sony--but I don't always know (hell, don't always believe) that they will work on, say, Marvin. Or X for Chrome. Or Bluefire. Mantano. It's a never-ending crapshoot, and all you can do is try to make your CSS fairly unbiased, and pray. A Lot. (And only warrant your work for the devices that are the biggest part of the market for which you are making them. For example, when we do UK authors, we test extensively on Kobo and Sony, rather than Nook, for obvious reasons. And that's where we tell the client that the books will work.)

It's a constant issue, and truly: I wish that the Consortium had addressed THAT, conformity, across platforms, before they decided that "multimedia" was just what they HAD TO DO. {sigh}.

Hitch

[mrmikel]

It's a never-ending crapshoot, and all you can do is try to make your CSS fairly unbiased, and pray.

And they say technology is the enemy of religion!!!!

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

And they say technology is the enemy of religion!!!!

Hitch

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

And they say technology is the enemy of religion!!!!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

Why would one buy something he can obtain for free? To prevent the illegal distribution DRM was invented.

Well, I know that DRM is there to be bypassed, but it may still be an issue with many people.

I can strip out the DRM in the time it takes to copy the eBook to Calibre. So can the people who do pirate eBooks. The DRM won't bother anyone distributing eBooks. It will only bother those who are trying to do things legally and don't know about removing DRM.

So your pirates are good to go and your customers are screwed. Yep, very nice business model.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Publishers who have gone DRM-free, notably Tor, have noted no decrease in sales since dropping DRM. DRM does absolutely nothing to stop a book from being pirated on torrents & other venues, but there is a vocal minority who won't buy any books ith DRM. The only kind of sharing DRM is semi effective in stopping is casual sharing (such as a friend passing a book to another friend).

And Tor is making more money as they don't have to pay for the DRM.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

I also hate DRM. But I have to admit that DRM ensures at least partially a certain surety for non distribution via torrents and the like. The problem with DRM is that it doesn't satisfy nobody, neither the owner, nor the customer.

As somebody who knows a great deal about how DRM works under the hood, let me start out by saying that every form of DRM is and will always be snake oil. It is fundamentally impossible to have anything approaching true DRM on a general-purpose computer or device. DRM is, quite literally, equivalent to handing someone a book locked in a lockbox, handing them the key to that box, and telling them, "You can unlock the lock to read the book, but you can't take the book out of the box, stick it on a photocopier, and make copies of it, because it's in a locked box."

Here's a quick dose of reality: Every time a new DRM scheme comes out, it takes a matter of weeks (at most) for somebody to crack it. For games, where playing the game during the first few weeks is curiously important to a lot of folks, that might actually have some value. In practice, it has little value for anything else.

I remember working on a big software project once, where several engineers proudly told me all about how amazing their DRM scheme was, and how deep the tendrils went into the software, and said that they didn't think the DRM would ever be broken. My snarky response was, "If someone breaks the DRM a month from now, will you release the source?" It didn't last a month. In fact, it barely lasted a week.

But, you might say, doesn't DRM keep honest people honest? I mean, that's the theory—that making it hard to copy something will make it less likely that people will copy it. The answer, unfortunately, is a resounding "no".

Ignoring the fundamental impossibility of truly unbreakable DRM, the second-biggest flaw with the concept of DRM for fixed content like books is that it only takes one person cracking the DRM one time to make that DRM worthless. After that, the DRM cracker can broadly distribute the cracked version, rather than the original, and nobody else will ever have to crack that particular piece of content again.

And once a single unencrypted copy exists, it's going to show up on sharing sites. If it doesn't, that's probably an indication that nobody on those sharing sites has even heard of the content in question, and thus there's no incentive ("cred") to share it.

In short, DRM just makes life harder for your paying customers by limiting the ways that they can use the book, but doesn't do anything to reduce mass piracy. The way I see it, the people who download your work off a file sharing site weren't going to pay you for it anyway. It's better to just write them off as non-customers, wash your hands of DRM, and sell books to people who want to buy them, in a form that they can use, without tying their hands by trying to lock those books to a particular platform or device.

And if you're really lucky, you might even find that some of your later book sales actually came from people who, while young and poor, illegally downloaded your content for free off a sharing site, got hooked on it, and then actually started buying copies of your books after they got out of college and got decent jobs.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

Here's a quick dose of reality: Every time a new DRM scheme comes out, it takes a matter of weeks (at most) for somebody to crack it.

Be fair -- that is only true when people care enough to break it.

Look at iBooks...

[ApK]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

But, you might say, doesn't DRM keep honest people honest? I mean, that's the theory—that making it hard to copy something will make it less likely that people will copy it. The answer, unfortunately, is a resounding "no".

Ignoring the fundamental impossibility of truly unbreakable DRM, the second-biggest flaw with the concept of DRM for fixed content like books is that it only takes one person cracking the DRM one time to make that DRM worthless. After that, the DRM cracker can broadly distribute the cracked version, rather than the original, and nobody else will ever have to crack that particular piece of content again.

I agree with your premise, but not your reasoning.
The vast majority of ebook consumers wouldn't know how to find a good sharing site or what to do with the files if they did.
Bookclub Betty don't know from BitTorrent.
The reason ebook DRM isn't more successful at "keeping honest people honest" or stopping as much casual sharing as some might think, is that stripping ebook DRM is SO quick and easy that even those people who don't know how or can't almost certainly KNOW SOMEONE who does and can, and it's trivial for them to do it for you.

Compare to DRM on movies, which is also easy to bypass, but takes a bit more know-how and considerably more time. It's often easier and faster for a non-techie to just stream, rent, or even buy a disc legally than to get a good copy.
My point is not that video DRM is very effective. It's not. My point is that compared to even THAT low standard of effectiveness, ebooks DRM is STILL remarkably ineffective.

And the more effective they try to make it, the more intrusive it becomes, and the more incentive there is to bypass it.

[Hitch]

dg:

You know, a lot of the time, I concur with you, but on this occasion, I must demur. You beg the question by making the assumption that people fall into two camps: a) the dishonest, who will rape and scrape an eBook, put it on a Darknet server, and Bob's-yer-uncle, and b) the hapless and inconvenienced reader/buyer, who does nothing wrong, but is frustrated and annoyed all the same.

I posted a pretty vehement and lengthy rant on this topic--not DRM, specifically, but about/around DRM, honesty and thievery--sometime recently here on MR, and I'm not going to regurgitate the whole thing to make everyone suffer through, but some quick observations, if I may:

1. An entire third camp or group of people exists. They are those who think of themselves as honest and simultaneously don't blink at nothing wrong, whatsoever, with giving a copy of something digital to their friends, family, etc.
2. If the thing cost money in the first place, so much the better, to give it "TO THE ONE I LOVE!"
3. You can see how this works easily--Google any popular piece of software, and look for the websites about how it can be had for FREE. Those websites would NOT be at the top of the search results--as we all know--if those terms weren't entered the way they are, with the frequency and demand that they are. So: what, there are a mere 10,000 dishonest people in the world driving Google's search engine results? Uh...no.
4. We all saw this behavior, "back in the day," with Lotus 1-2-3, the epitome of illicit "file-sharing" if ever piece of software was the case study therefor. EVERYBODY (all those HONEST people) took Lotus, which was then ouchy-expensive, home from the office. All those honest people made illicit copies for their own computers. All those honest people gave disks--which they copied from one drive to the other--to their friends, family, etc. LOTUS is the reason we HAVE software licensing, for heaven's sake, and protections in place--because we learned, to our shock, that people are NOT intrinsically honest, particularly when it comes to the impalpable existence of the digital item--coupled with a COMPLETE lack of consequences and enforcement of any real nature.
5. This is called "casual theft," and this is, absolutely, the biggest issue in the industry, to my mind. Not the pirates--the well-meaning, unthinking casual abuse of a publisher's and author's rights to be PAID for their work.
6. Yes, I already know the counter-argument: well, those people wouldn't pay for the book, anyway. Oh, yeah? Well, then, they shouldn't get to ENJOY it, either. The sheer hubris of this--that somehow, because they're CHEAP and dishonest, they should get to enjoy the stolen work--just boggles me. It's like rewarding them for being crooks. What, and "someday," when they have paying jobs, they'll reverse their behavior and become honest people? Why should anyone believe that? Honesty isn't like changing your kicks (sneakers). You either are, or you aren't.
7. As someone who has been thoroughly and repeatedly ripped-off by AUTHORS (mind you), for "digital works," and was forced to implement a "no pay, no play" policy at my company, I will never--never--change my mind about DRM and readers. I just won't. I've been completely hosed by authors, with nary even a glance backwards. There are books on Amazon to which I can point you, and say: there goeth a stolen book. And I don't mean mere hundreds in a given year, in terms of $$$; I mean THOUSANDS.
8. Given that I've learned, first-hand, just how dishonest people are, I see no reason to think that, for example, Smashwording an eBook file, to make it even EASIER to give away your books, is a brilliant idea. Sure, O'Reilly does it, and sneeringly condescends about everyone else who won't, but O'Reilly charges enough for what it sells legitimately so that they can AFFORD the occasional hit. (And don't think for one second that they don't have people trolling the Darknet for pirated copies, either). Would O'Reilly blithely ignore someone backing a truck up to his office and making off with a few pallets of books he had printed? Decline to prosecute the offenders? I don't think so.

People like to think, and to say, that they are honest. My experience says otherwise. When I tell folks that I was in RE Development for decades, with builders, contractors, you-name-it, they always assume that I saw massive corruption, thievery, etc. And you know what? What little I did see (and trust me, I was always looking for it) was NOTHING compared to what perfectly "honest" people will do given the chance. NOTHING. At least people who openly admit that they are dishonest know what they are. It's the "normal" people who would be offended by the idea that they are dishonest who will steal you blind, given half a chance. It's constantly appalling to me that I could--after the kind of career I've had--become absolutely jaded about how dishonest people really are, at my age.

And those people are the massively large "set" of people that you've omitted from your post. You're not talking about 1 out of 5 people; according to the Digital Watermarking studies (surveys conducted of regular people, mind you), you're ignoring 3 out of 5--to be conservative.

Here endeth the rant. /

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Is there any real difference to my buying an eBook, putting it on my Reader, reading it, loaning my wife my Reader so she can then read that book vs. my putting a copy of that eBook on my Wife's Reader so she can read it without having to wait until I am done reading it?

The only real difference is that she doesn't have to wait for me to finish. If I didn't strip DRM, I have enough slots in the DRM scheme that I could put it on her Reader with DRM anyway.

Does anyone have any objection to scenario #1 and/or #2? You know it happens and you know it will continue to happen. I cannot think of many household that would buy multiple copies of the same book (e or p) and not share it if others in the house also wanted to read it.