About eBooks
As noted elsewhere, the Poitin
Press is a virtual publishing house in that it sells its books
over the Internet both as printed and eBooks. Our reasons for us doing so are explained in "About
Us". In this section we would like to briefly explain the current
state of eBooks, what your options are, and what are the advantages and
disadvantages of each. The intent is to help you make your choice of which
is for you.
The Choices
Presently, there are several
different formats of eBook readers. They fall into two basic categories:
Those that run on a computer such as a workstation, tablet or laptop, and those
that require a special device, often called an "eBook" but are
really a special-purpose computer in their own right. A third category
based on smart phones and similar hand-held devices is also available.
The Available Hardware
One interesting factoid is
that while the popularity of workstations is dropping, they are not being
completely
replaced by "Internet appliances" as touted in the last few
years, or even smart phones, or the new "Tablets." By far and away, the
choice is still the combination of laptops and smart phones, which are generally
used in combination by today's cyber road-warriors. The smart phone or now
tablet is used during
meetings and such and then downloaded into the laptop so that the
information can be gathered into spreadsheets, reports, and
presentations. This makes the laptop, tablet and even workstation
important hardware for the eBook marketers because the target customer is likely to already have one,
and so does not have to buy, support and cart around yet another bit of
hardware.
Still, in the last year, dedicated eBook readers, particularly the
Kindle, have become more and more important as their sales increase.
This means that the eBook publisher needs to support a number of
different hardware platforms, which dictates the choice of formats.
Available eBook formats -- Yesterday
This market has changed a good deal in even the last couple of years.
For a long time there were several "major" formats such as Adobe
Acrobat Reader or
PDF, Microsoft Reader or LIT, and Palm eBook or PDB.
The Adobe format looks the most like a printed book, and indeed is just
the PDF generated from the digital form of the book. Its real advantage
was it worked well with technical books or other books with many tables
and figures.
The LIT format really was the Open
eBook (OEB) forum format with several additional features. Based on HTML,
it was easily adapted to a number of different hardware platforms,
allowing reformatting the pages on the fly so they fit the available
space. This, however, was not particularly useful for books with
many tables and illustrations.
Palm, which was selling the Palm Pilot, then the leading PDA, was very
limited in its display screen and so the PDB format was -- well,
basically crude. But it worked well on the Palm Pilot and so it was
a popular eBook format for number of years. But of late, it
has been surpassed by the new generation of "Smart Phones" and so has
fallen in sales dramatically.
Thus for a number of years, we offered our books in these formats and
while we sold many copies of both the Adobe and Palm formatted eBooks, up
until now, we have sold exactly two copies of books in the LIT format,
which we do not understand as it is an excellent eBook format.
Likewise, the Palm format is no longer selling well. It has been
surpassed by the new generation of "Smart Phones" and so has fallen in
sales dramatically.
This has forced us to look at the second generation of eBooks currently
on offer.
Available eBook formats -- Today
The market has changed substantially in the last couple years with the
advent of both the EPUB format offered by the International Digital
Publishing Forum (IDPF) -- an offshoot of the Open eBook Form and the
introduction of the Kindle by Amazon. The Kindle is the first
commercially successful eBook Reader, and opened the doors for dozens of
competitive machines. However, at this point in time, the Kindle is
the market leader, driving sales through the aggressive marketing of the
product by Amazon, and the many, many thousands of eBooks
purchasable directly from Amazon's Kindle bookstore. The "native"
ebook format the Kindle uses is the MobiPocket or MOBI format, but it also
will display the EPUB format as well.
And there are a couple dozen other eBook formats out there as well, but
when you look at the market, there are the PDF based eBooks which are
still popular with those who need many tables and illustrations in their
books, and there are the EPUB and MOBI formatted books, both of
which are based on HTML and are flowable, or dynamically reformatable, an
important feature for many who want to read their eBooks on smart phones
or other small screen devices.
Thus it could be argued that the EPUB format has replaced the LIT
format, and the MOBI has replaced the Palm PDB. Both the new formats
are superior to their predecessors, and both are more widely supported.
For example, the Kindle reader and its related software supports
both. And the new Adobe Digital Editions Reader support both the old
PDF format, which is still very popular, as well as the EPUB format.
It is basically because of this widespread support that we are going to
continue to offer our eBooks in both the EPUB
and Kindle MOBI formats. And we are offering all our
books in the Kindle Store as well at the Barnes and Noble Nook store, for your convenience.
If you would like to know more about how to order our books, both in
printed and eBook formats, or where to find the software to read these on
you devices, including your Apple computers, iPads and iPhones, go to
"How to Order".
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