Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Regarding E-books


Steve Green has a widely-discussed post up today regarding the burgeoning Amazon/Apple e-book fight.

As the author of an out-of-print book (along with a certain mistaken-for-a-new-US Senator co-author), my $0.02 is, I'd be overjoyed to revive the thing for Kindle/iPad/whatever. My old book still sells on Amazon via the used book store, but I don't see a dime out of those sales (nor should I, per First Sale doctrine). It's not worth a publisher's money to put it back in print--even if the publisher still existed, which it does not--but the rights have long since reverted back, and I'm definitely interested in republishing it as an e-book.

The 70% royalty rate from Amazon, even for a few bucks a copy, beats the living hell out of "nothing." Come to think of it, it'd almost certainly add up to more per copy than we earned out of our original book contract.

1 comment:

  1. If you've still got the text in electronic form, creating an ebook is fairly simple. There are a number of free tools to do it. I'd put it into epub, which most of the readers but Kindle read directly, and I know that Amazon will take that epub and do the conversion for you to Kindle format if you don't want to do it yourself.

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