Pay What You Will Kindle Promotion for Show Networks and Control Systems Book
- Thread starterJohnHuntington
- Start date
D'oh! I have a Nook. I might have to get the kindle reader for my netbook then.
JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
Sorry about that! I'm still hoping to make it in PDF format, but I want individual watermarks and I haven't been able to find anyone to offer that as a service to self publishers...
John
JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
Doing one would be pretty easy
I'm looking for something like, "From the library of Joe Smith". My former publisher can do it, I just haven't found anyone to do it for me as a service, and I don't have time to make individual versions...
John
JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
I've run it on my Android tablet in the Kindle app and it looks OK. I still think the e-format for technical books overall sucks, though
John
techieman33
Well-Known Member
I've run it on my Android tablet in the Kindle app and it looks OK. I still think the e-format for technical books overall sucks, though
John
I saw a full color textbook that looked amazing on an ipad. The problem is they have to be formatted for specific devices, if you just convert a standard file there will almost always be something that isn't quite right. It'll be a great day when we can carry all of our reference materials with us on a single device instead of needing to carry around a lot of heavy books. And they'll be more more easily searched for specific things as well.
JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
Exactly. I looked into this pretty deeply, and the only way that I could figure out to make an EPUB file look any good would be to basically start over strip out all of the layout, and then end up with two versions going forward, or format completely for epub (which would make the print edition look horrible). I wrote about that investigation process here.
I started with the print edition because more people preferred that (based on a survey I did, details here), and this is something I agree with completely. When I started this process I started buying all my non-technical books on Kindle, and even basic books with just a few graphics can look and read terribly in that format.
The only solution I can see for complex books today is print and PDF, but as I said I have not been able to find a provider to sell me individually watermarked PDF's as a service. As soon as I can find that I'll issue a PDF within a few days.
In the meantime, the kindle edition of my book is readable, and, of course, searchable, but it works better as an aid to the printed edition than an easy read. I detailed some of the formatting problems here.
It's a fascinating time to be involved, but we sure don't have a good, unified solution yet.
John
JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
The results, in case you were wondering:
Pay What You Will E-Book Promotion Wrapup — Control Geek
Thanks to everyone who donated!
John
Pay What You Will E-Book Promotion Wrapup — Control Geek
Thanks to everyone who donated!
John
Argh! I totally forgot. Thanks for doing this for the community.
Just a thought, but I think I remember the NFPA watermarking some of their PDF versions of print books (or did at least) maybe you could ask them what they are/were using/doing to get that done?
JohnHuntington
Well-Known Member
Interesting, thanks, I'll try and check that out. The technology definitely exists--my former publisher does it. I'm kind of amazed that no one's selling this as a service to self-publishing authors.
thanks!
John
Control Geek
It would be tough to sell the service standalone, since then you'd need to fiddle around connecting your e-commerce system to the watermarking service. It would be quite easy to write as a plugin for osCommerce, Zencart, or similar, though.
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