I have my first eBook published, and am working on 2 more to see if I can get them ready before I head South ( Not likely)
I have been asked several times why I am epublishing and why PDF?
a) I don’t have a lot of money. In order to produce high quality printed material you have to spend money. Blurb, Lulu, Pikto etc, can produce good looking books, but their print quality is ok. I want the quality of these images to be better the ok…. I want them to be AMAZING… and that costs bucks. I lack storage and shipping facilities.
b) Disturbution. I don’t want to spend time and effort sending out hard copies.
c) Ease of portability and viewing. PDF can be read on most tablets and computers, so the files are transportable and accessible.
d) epub vs PDF. Epub is a great file format for word heavy applications. If properly formatted the words flow, the Table of Content behaves well, and readers like the Kindle, Kobo, and Nookdo a great job of displaying text and making the reading experience enjoyable. The problem is that ePub mangles images. The ereaders that do a good job with ePub, do not display images very well.
A PDF has the ablity to be zoomed in and out, it holds the formating properly across platforms and is a stable format.
I like that fact that by not making paper copies of my material I am not using paper and ink and if the book doesn’t sell that the discards will not end up in landfill.
