anyone here actually read ebooks?
i run a lit mag and i'm trying to determine if it's worth the significant extra effort to put epub & kindle out there.
they barely sell. i do much better with the print editions. i'm just not sure if the audience is small but loyal, or if digital feels like a bonus addon that people take but never actually read.
please give me your insights!!! i need perspective outside my own. :)
boost too, if you'd be so kind.
@maunzikation good to know! thank you!
@pixelpaperyarn I prolly won't read this, but as a kindle user, that'd be v nice to have. pdfs are a nightmare to read on a reader. epub can be converted to mobi quite easily, but pdf not so much
@MightyPork i do all three formats now (pdf => epub AND kindle). they just don't do much to support the mag so i'm determining if the extra labor is worth it. i try to make them NICE, too, so it's not an automated system.
@pixelpaperyarn I love ebooks, and I could pay for if it worth it
@pixelpaperyarn I love digital editions, although I do like having some paper books around the house too.
@pixelpaperyarn I mostly read ebooks. It's nothing to do with aesthetics, I'm just terrible at organizing my physical possessions
@pixelpaperyarn I prefer ebooks, if only because it limits the amount of physical stuff I own. I just moved cross-country and it made a huge difference not having a heavy library to bring along.
@pixelpaperyarn i do! i read them (and buy and borrow from library) more than i do physical books now. my kobo ereader is what got me back into reading fiction again
as for magazines, i tend to read those on my ipad (bigger screen), but usually i get them from the library-- i rarely buy e-magazines, to be honest
@bunnyhero my mag is pretty much all text. it gets presented more like a short story anthology than a traditional mag.
the only add is a couple of in-house things in the back for the 5th year anthology and the patreon.
@pixelpaperyarn Almost exclusively digital, and that almost exclusively on my phone's screen. So. Kindle (well, MOBI, which was Palm's format long before Amazon came along) and Epub are important for me, anyway.
@pixelpaperyarn I prefer ebooks even for magazines, but they are a lot of work.
Amazon doesn't really like them since you can only have ~10 authors and you MUST have an author entry (instead of just an editor like they used to).
In the stores I've helped manage, they provide a steady though low traffic income. If you have to pull it from a year because of contracts, probably not worth it.
If your production pipeline made it easier, I'd say yes. If not? Not sure.
@pixelpaperyarn my wife only reads ebooks. I'm about 50/50, but a lot more likely to take a chance on something with an ebook than a physical copy.
@Jsuttonmorse @pixelpaperyarn my reading is about the same...50/50, but I buy ebooks more easily.
@pixelpaperyarn I read almost exclusively ebooks. But I think litmags are better in print. I haven't worked on one in years. But they are a medium I think works better in print.
If it's a lot of work for little to no return. Skip it.
Just my 2 cents.
@pixelpaperyarn I actually prefer audiobooks!
@pixelpaperyarn That's surprising. All the other indie authors I follow have reported the opposite, with their print sales being dwarfed by digital sales.
What about your production process requires extra effort for digital releases?
@jaycie i think people just like reading our stuff in print for some reason. we do have the stories up on the website as well (which is changing next year, so we'll see).
i start with print files, reformat for pdf, export that to epub (which has to get manually cleaned up because InDesign does weird formatting), and finally to kindle (which is a simple conversion).
i get clean html from the epub and that goes to the website, so i wouldn't be saving tons by dropping digital.
@pixelpaperyarn Yeah, it's not a universal rule.
I am surprised by the workflow. That sounds like the reverse order of what I usually see, including my own. But it works for you!
@jaycie it's graceful degradation in a publishing paradigm. 😆
it partly comes from my previous life as a print designer. i make it look really good in print first, and then slowly strip my pretty styling back down until i'm at raw text again.
in the process, i clean the text up so at the end, it's super clean.
@pixelpaperyarn Playing to your strengths! Conversely, I'm someone who drafts everything in Markdown and writes Ruby scripts to auto-generate PDFs. %D
@pixelpaperyarn I try to read only ebooks these days. I can fit a lot more digital material in my pocket 😉
Having said that, I only go for ePub myself. I'm not fond of the Amazon format and PDF doesn't do anything useful on different screen sizes. ePub seems to be the best (in my experience) for reflow and 'just working'.
@pixelpaperyarn Nope. Never. With the exception of a pile of pirates copies of out of print nearly impossible to find stuff that is for my job.
Other than that no way. Why would I?
@pixelpaperyarn I read e-*books* but not e-mags.
The problem is that I don't connect my Kobo to the web enough to get weekly or monthly magazines.
But I do think there's a niche for it, however small.
@s02303947 my mag is more like a short story anthology. no ads, all text, etc.
thanks for your input!
@pixelpaperyarn I only read ebooks. But I'm very selective in what I buy because I'm poor. Love my kindle for trips :)
@pixelpaperyarn I personally much prefer print to ebooks because I know that years down the road my book/magazine/etc can still be opened and doesn't rely on some company's technology who may or may not still exist at that time.
Plus, I really like to be away from a screen from time to time.
Hope this helps!
@Yarideki it does help! thanks! i feel the same way.
@pixelpaperyarn I hate ebooks. I read exclusively print stuff, unless it's not available in dead tree form.
@pixelpaperyarn I only do ebooks (epub or PDF, iBooks store if possible) now, especially for ephemeral content.
Bigger picture, ebook sales have exceeded print at times. A lot of people are post-dead-trees.
@pixelpaperyarn I read them if I need them right away and it will take too long to get physical copy. I live in Canada and sometimes books take awhile to get here if they're not super popular and so already in stock somewhere. But generally I prefer paper versions when I can get them and don't mind waiting.
@pixelpaperyarn I read only ebooks unless it's something with pretty pictures that I want to own physically. I don't always buy them, though, because it's quite hard to find where I can buy them in English usually (bad excuse probably but it's a problem here)
@pixelpaperyarn I wrote one - am a uni prof by job and my paper book is expensive, and so when I wrote the second one, I chose to do it as an ebook with the hope that people would actually read it (I could make it cheap if I controlled it). -and that one's not academic in the same way. I'm beginning to think it is a completely separate audience. although I don't have a clue how to market/promote & think for sure I'm missing a trick in that, but I didn't learn it training as a cello player... :)
@pixelpaperyarn
For what it's worth, I am all eBook now.
It means I can carry more, read in the dark*, get things faster, have access to a wider range of material and have things like 2600 automatically delivered.
I also have found recently, the ability to highlight sections so I can copy then to my computer to make references particularly useful.
I still buy paper based books, but only if they rely on images, so mostly graphic novels in my case.
*Kindle Paperwhite
@pixelpaperyarn Ebooks vs paper books are somewhat like cars vs horse cabs. They're cheaper to create, cheaper to distribute and more handy in many cases. Nowadays I avoid buying paper books.
@pixelpaperyarn I read ebooks when :
* the book only exists in ebook form
* the printed book is written so small it hurts my eyes
* when I travel : it's lighter than carrying several paper books
* the book is out of print and second hands are too expensive
* ebooks are useful to quickly search in them and copy/paste parts of them
* when I know I'll never buy the physical book, I use a pirate scan
* to easily share books with friends living far away
I prefer paper but ebook can be useful.
@pixelpaperyarn Also, I almost never actually *buy* ebooks. If they have DRMs or are as expensive as the paper version I won't buy them.
@ordinarylava thanks for the feedback!
i purposefully make my digital editions DRM-free and cheap (about $4) for exactly all the reasons you mentioned. :)
@pixelpaperyarn I'm reading epubs. :-)
@pixelpaperyarn I rarely get around to reading them, even if I want to. But if I'd be able to subscribe to a magazine on kindle, maybe I would.
@pixelpaperyarn I've put some stuff on Smashwords that was eligible for their 'extended reach' distribution which pushes ebooks to places like the istore, Barnes and Noble, etc. With zero promotion from me a few of them sell every month. They're really cheap, small things, so I don't make more than about $10 a month from there, but they definitely get sales.
@WelshPixie thanks for the feedback!
hmm. i might check out smashwords again. last time i looked at them their formatting restrictions were super strict and didn't work with my production flow. but it might solve some of my distribution problems.
@pixelpaperyarn Reading novel only with my Kindle. I tried to read mag as PDF or epub, but I don't liked it, I found it inadequate.
@pixelpaperyarn hey! I was skeptical about ebooks until I got a reader a couple years ago. Since then I only purchased and read ebooks.
@pixelpaperyarn i only read books in digital format. Best thing is to get some sort of download code when you buy the print version.
@pixelpaperyarn I pretty much exclusively read ebooks. A large share of my reading happens on work trips, and there is no way I'm lugging paper for that.
@pixelpaperyarn I think it depends on habbits. What you grew up with. I grew up with reading books and find it strange to switch to ebooks, although I have some of them. The reasons for trees saved are cool, but habbits are hard.
Maybe the next generation or the one afterwards will only read ebooks.
@pixelpaperyarn I read ebooks. Pretty much the only books I have physical versions of are ones I've gotten as a present or similar. I just don't really like buying physical things because they take space and require cleaning and so on.
@pixelpaperyarn Read them all the time, as a fair proportion of your other responses have mentioned, it is easier to carry several thousand ebooks than their print equivalents.
Though as someone else said, I read e-books not e-magazines.
format: epub2, or epub3 (that more often than not I'll convert to epub2).
apps: FBReader & Moon Reader+ on Android.
sites: Amazon {I convert the Mobi / AZW3 files to epub2}.
@pixelpaperyarn I love ebooks as a concept (my e-reader is more comfortable to hold than a dead tree book, and somehow I read books faster on it) but so many ebooks have terrible formatting that it's off-putting.
@Inskora thanks for the feedback!
part of the reason i put the question out there was exactly that reason. i spend a fair amount of extra time making sure the epub is well-formatted and i'm gauging whether that effort is worth it.
seems like it is!
@pixelpaperyarn Oh yeah, definitely. I think a lot of publishers just digitise the print master file and leave it at that.
@pixelpaperyarn I read them if they are free or cheap, I admit. o_o;
tbh I'm in a similar situation, where I produce a very short run of serialised comics, but I want to keep them relevant, so I'll need to make ebook versions of back issues (it'll be easier than keeping stock of lots of issues which might never or will hardly move). so if nothing else, it'll be an easy way to preserve and keep access to back issues, if you make ebook versions.
@pixelpaperyarn i too read mostly ebooks
@pixelpaperyarn I read novels as ebooks but I can't say I've really ever read a magazine as an ebook tbh.
@pixelpaperyarn (tl;dr I've run an ebook publishing company for years and love the format + availability of ebooks)
I've bought and published ebooks for years -- for me it's all about cost, especially in the academic world. I can publish an ebook for $3-4, when to sell one in print form would be at *least* $10 through something like Amazon's print-on-demand, without much revenue back to me at all after Amazon's cut.
@pixelpaperyarn I have 91 ebooks on Calibre waiting for me to work through them.
@pixelpaperyarn I don't read as much as I'd like to, and I can't buy as many books as I'd like to, but when I do buy books, they're ebooks.