
Books vs "e-books"? - davidw
http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/05/books-vs-e-books#
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jamesbritt
Reasonable concerns, but most apply to print books as well.

Reputation is reputation, whether it's a publishing house or a sole author.
I've bought crappy books from reputable publishers (O'Reilly had a book on
VBScript that was total crap, for example), so you still have to do some
checking to see if a book is really going to be worth your time and money. For
most technical data it seems a bit of time on Google should tell you if the
author knows his or her stuff.

A more reasonable concern is copy editing. While publishers may no longer be
vetting the technical aspects well as they should (The book RESTful Web
Services, for example, has assorted (mostly minor) technical errors) the
overall editing quality tends to be good. I have less faith in sole
author/editor/publisher set-ups to have proper grammar and consistent use of
the author's voice, for example.

OTOH, most E-books tend to be cheaper than printed books, and are often bought
to expedite some development process. If I can save myself an hour two of
research and dead-ends while working on a paid contract, then I've easily
saved myself many times the cost of the book.

Finally, printed books go on sale, too, or end up in the discount bin, so
while it's not the same as finding out you could have gotten something for
free, it's close.

The value of technical info depends on how timely it is; these are perishable
goods with a limited shelf life. You want it fresh, you gots to pay more.

One annoyance with E-books that wasn't mentioned was the lack of appropriate
screen formatting. I have some PDFs from Pragmatic Press, for example, and
they are all laid out for the printed page, not for my laptop screen. Nothing
flows; I have to deal with hard page breaks as if I were dealing with paper.

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arihelgason
Getting Real is still sold as a physical book through self publishing
marketplace Lulu.

Print on demand publishing is really easy and the value people place on having
a hard copy makes it worth looking into as an extra sales channel.

I co-authored a book whose sales are largely driven by bulk orders from high
schools. They would never buy 100 licenses for a PDF version, but are quite
happy to buy 100 books to distribute to their students.

We considered only publishing it as an ebook, but having negotiated a
favourable deal with a print on demand shop we're only selling it as a hard
copy with very good margins.

If you outsource fulfillment, the process can be automated just like ebook
sales.

