As I mentioned in my Twitter back in July, I was looking forward to this, being in the company of Burroughs and Swift. Emperor Dad has been published in a number of formats, including two paper editions, PDF, Kindle and now this, an iPhone App. It’s a great experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.
The big advantage I see here is that Emperor Dad has a chance to show up. A corner bookstore will have thousands of books on its shelves. PDF ebooks are spread out all over cyberspace and only the experienced know where to look. The Kindle system has 125000 titles for it’s 250000 Kindle owners. The iPhone App store has about 200 titles for a million iPhone users, with that expecting to grow to ten million iPhone users this year. And one thing I have learned from experience this month — when two or more iPhone users get together, the first thing they do is talk about the Apps they have downloaded.
So when I was approached by an App developer with the idea of publishing one of my books, I was ready. I had previously gone through the process of converting the text to the cut-down HTML that Kindle format uses, so all I had to do was send him the file.
The App store is mostly $0.99 cent editions of public domain books, and a handful of current titles at higher prices. Go. Tap. Download. It’s easy to find. This ought to be an interesting experiment. If it works, I’d have no problem putting other titles out this way as well.
Just FYI, a lot of e-book readers (myself included) don’t really consider PDF to be a real e-book format. We’re most familiar with it from the form of hard-coded page sizes meant for printing, that can be read on a screen but not very conveniently. Even if they’ve changed that for the e-book reader version (I’ve heard something about reflowable PDFs), it still has kind of a bad reputation—and a lot of PDAs don’t have readers for it.But all the same, congratulations on getting your feet wet in the e-book medium! There are a surprising number of people out there who prefer e-books to print books, and the better the reading devices available, the more this number grows.I’d like to suggest you check out the TeleRead blog for which I am one of the writers, a blog that covers the e-book/e-publishing industry and topics of interest to it. You might find some useful information there.