I've been pumping out ebooks (a) ever since 2003 and (b) ever since I got tired of paper-based book publishers paying tiny royalties for my hard work. As you probably know, my line of ebooks is (a) massive and (b) available in PDF format, only.
I tried outputting them in other ebook formats, like ePub, but found (a) these formats require too much tweaking (hence the beauty of WYSIWYG PDF!) and (b) I just didn't have the time.
So I was pretty interested when I read about a new publishing company that was (a) dedicated to the ebook market and (b) dedicated to authors: Fair Trade Digital Exchange. Co-founder and former book agent Claudette Moore and I spent the last several months figuring out (a) how to meld our operations, in which I keep writing and distributing my ebooks in PDF, but (b) they get to reformat the books in all other ebook formats, and then distribute them through their own site, as well as other portals.
More recently, I've been working with co-founder and technical guy Chris Williams on the tricky problem of making nice looking ePub documents from heavily formatted InDesign files. The ePub format is kind of like HTML, and so works best with books like novels, where all it consists of are chapter headings and plain text. ePub is a dog for technical books, which have figures, sidebars, and specially formatted text, like for programming code and command input.
So anyhow, long story short, today my name went up on the roster of authors with FairTradeDX.
The first ebook of mine being offered, What's Inside? AutoCAD 2012, is slightly dated, but Mr Williams thought it was the most heavily formatted, and so would make a good test case. In the weeks and months to come, more of my titles will become available. (Once conversion templates are perfected, the ePub translation happens faster.)
FairTradeDX sells its line of ebooks as a package. When you pay $9.95, you get the What's Inside title in a single ZIP file that contains all three formats:
- ePub for most ebook readers and software
- Mobi for Amazon ebook readers
- PDF for all other cases
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