More on Publishing
In the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune Employment section there is a regular column that discussed the problems of finding a suitable position. The two moderators usually publish a letter they receive, then take turns writing paragraphs addressing the concerns expressed. Both have written books. In a recent column they announced that the newest book one of them wrote was now available, either as a printed, hardbound book or as a free electronic version, complete in every way, that the user could download in any of several formats, to read on his own machine.
Why, you might ask, pay for something you can get for free? But consider for a moment the hidden costs, the convenience factor and the quality of the final product.
Most users will have their own printers. If it is an ink jet printer, making a book copy is likely to be very expensive. Those ink cartridges are not cheap. The nearly 300 pages it will be necessary to print will probably use up at least one ink cartridge. Let's guess the cost of ink at about $40. Using a laser printer, the price of toner might come to half of that. If you print on only one side of the paper, that's over half a ream of paper.
Printing the thing is likely to be quite a job. You would have to break it into pieces and print a few pages at a time or risk major problems when your machine runs out of ink or toner. With my luck I would also run out of paper, requiring a quick trip to the store. Then you have to assemble the pages in order and bind them, even if this means nothing more than punching holes in each page and inserting them into a binder. When you are done, what you end up with depends entirely on how much effort you put into producing it.
You don't have to print it out, though -- you can sit there at your computer and read it for nothing. Then it will be just as portable as your computer is. How much is the author asking for the printed copy? I don't know. I'm not going to read the book anyway. But if you order the book, you will probably get a much higher quality item than producing it yourself, it will probably be cheaper, and you will avoid a lot of work and frustration.
Some people will download the book, read portions of it, then decide whether to buy it or not. If they decide it isn't suitable for their purposes and opt not to buy, they are still left with a good feeling about the author for allowing them to examine the product.
There seems to be almost no down side to doing it this way.
In a totally unrelated development, Project Gutenberg is looking for people who can record onto DVDs of some kind. They want to record their entire collection of public domain books, now close to 10,000 works, so they can give them away. They have been giving them away on CDs, but it takes too many to hold the entire collection.
Project Gutenberg expects to pass the 10,000 mark in the United States any time now. The PG operation in Australia is healthy, with nearly 200 works in the short time they've been in operation, and Canada is trying to start up a PG operation of their own.
There are many ways you can help PG, but one that is fun is to become a Distributed Proofreader. If you enjoy editing, give it a whirl. Use the same PG link I gave above.