Getting Past Good Enough Ebooks: Liza Daly

Getting past “good enough” ebooks Liza Daly Threepress Consulting Inc.

What’s wrong with commercial ebooks today: A case study $7.16 from the Sony Store ePub format Picked entirely at random. Names obscured to protect the innocent.

Book Title Author Print Ebook

The reading experience: Book Title Author Page 1

The reading experience: Page 2

The reading experience: Useless print-only notice Information ISBN doesn’t match suggesting this is the any metadata on the paperback edition Sony ebook site, and is not the ebook ISBN Page 4

All ereaders provide a method of navigating the table of contents. Drop the TOC from book content! Table of Contents in Adobe Digital Editions

(The rare exception would be books with table of contents that contain authorial content or are specially designed.) A Field Guide to the Birds (Peterson 1934)

Finally we get to the book... Page 7!

Google and others have shown that in a digital world, milliseconds count. Users who encountered only an additional 200 ms delay in web page loading demonstrated a drop in engagement.

On ereading devices, turning a page can take from 2 to 20 seconds.

On ereading devices, turning a page can take from 2 to 20 seconds. You want users hooked immediately. They won’t page for up to a minute just to ﬁgure out if they like the book.

On ereading devices, turning a page can take from 2 to 20 seconds. You want users hooked immediately. They won’t page for up to a minute just to ﬁgure out if they like the book. They’ll go buy a different book.

On the Kindle platform, book samples are 5-10% of the total book size.

On the Kindle platform, book samples are 5-10% of the total book size. This sample book was 263 pages. 5% of 263 is 13 pages. This means half of the user’s preview was wasted on front matter.

It could be worse!

You want this:

Ebook buyers decide on purchases based on: Traditional marketing Online reviews Sample chapters

There’s no excuse for bad editorial just because it’s an ebook. Here the very ﬁrst occurrence of the protagonist’s name is misspelled. (It’s “Vere.”)

How does this happen? Ebooks are created before the ﬁnal proofs. They’re outsourced. Publishers lack the resources to evaluate the quality of the conversions.

A crash course in ebook quality control:

1. Get a smartphone or eink device. Choose the one that best reﬂects where customers will be reading your books. If you only sell on Amazon, get a Kindle. If you’re selling business books, get a smartphone.

2. Put the ebook on it and check each page through the end of the ﬁrst chapter. Consider the 5% rule. After reading 5% of the book, do you know what it’s about? Ideally the very ﬁrst thing you see should be “Chapter One”. “Front matter” can go at the end, or be removed.

3. Basic editorial rules still apply! Ebook buyers don’t like typos or bad line breaks any more than print readers. Badly-formatted ebooks are often returned.

In some cases, pirated ebooks are superior to professionally-produced ones.

Ofﬁcial ePub edition has weird line breaks.

Pirated version has bi- directional TOC links, footnotes and endnotes even though it was scanned from paper. Nice color cover:

Ebook QA checklist • Reconsider releasing ebooks from early proofs. • Eliminate unnecessary front-matter. • Check on at least one commercial ereader. • The ﬁrst chapter is your marketing plan.

Thanks. Liza Daly Threepress Consulting Inc. http://threepress.org/ liza@threepress.org Twitter: @liza

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Getting Past Good Enough Ebooks: Liza Daly

by Digital Book World on Feb 02, 2010

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