Self Publishing Made Cheap
When I was a kid in the sixties, we bought records that played our favorite bands, new technology then had us listening to those bands on eight track tapes and cassettes. In the twenty-first century our music comes on a CD, but even that is now losing ground to music being downloaded from the internet on to Ipods and MP3s.
The internet allows us now to download e-books that can be read on our computers or printed out. The popular Kindle, Ipad and the copy cats are changing the way people buy and read books. It’s just in its infancy but I have no doubt that the e-book will someday in the future replace the paper book. Newspapers are going online and you see magazines setting up their online sites. You will pay to read the news online someday and your favorite photo magazines will follow. It’s cost effective.
This makes sense to me as I self published my own book ”Tiny Landscapes” and bought 2,000 copies for $12,000.00, and in the last year I’ve created four e-books that cost me nothing to produce the product. The Tiny Landscapes book cost to package and ship which is passed on to the customer, and the e-books are sent to the customer via internet costing me and the customer nothing for delivery, and they can get it instantly.
Like record stores that have gone under we’ll eventually see the end of the local Barnes and Noble and Borders. Amazon is on the leading edge of the transformation to e-books and it’s getting bigger each day. This won’t happen over night but it will happen. School text books that cost a fortune at the college level will go to the e-book and someday when every kid has a laptop, public schools will have text books downloaded to the kids computers.
As businesses are always looking for ways to cut cost, e-books would be a huge savings for publishers printing books. Now if everyone can produce an e-book without any cost, will this hurt the publishers, as you don’t need the publishers money to produce your book. Authors can self publish their own e-books and submit them to the online sites.
I sell my “Tiny Landscapes” book through Amazon who has to warehouse all these books and the cost of all the people to run the warehouses, which is a huge cost to the company. Just think how much they will save when all books are e-books. They just need hardrives to store all the e-books, which will save tons of money on warehouses, labor, and shipping.
E-books in how-to nature photography are becoming more popular, photogs like well known bird photographer Arthur Morris has some e-books. William Neil, writer for "Outdoor Photgrapher" just released some e-books. Another birder Alan Murphy has a new e-book, David DuChemin has e-books on composition. More and more pro's I talk to are getting their e-books together. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out in time.
I think it's great because many of these great photographers that can teach us things will have a way to produce information without mortgaging their homes.