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BB eBooks Newsletter – August 15, 2012

Dear Friend,

Greetings from Bangkok! This is the second newsletter from BB eBooks and thank you to all our clients and well-wishers for supporting us during the early days of our startup. Please drop us a line if you are looking to get your book into a professional eBook format.

Keeping Track of all these Gadgets

For our valued clients and visitors, do you have the eReading device of your dreams on your shopping list? How many tablets have you bought or are you considering grabbing your first one? This informative guide by CNET compares the huge collection of eReaders on the market. Rumor has it that Amazon, B&N, and Apple will all launch new devices sometime this year.

On Social Media

Even though some establishmentarians in the publishing world think social media is a waste of time, we at BB eBooks would like to utilize it to assist our clients. Gof, the BB eBooks Marketing & Sales Director, has been tasked with developing an insightful and helpful Twitter campaign that will benefit our valued clients and readers. Please follow him @Panich_C and let him know what sort of links would be helpful in your publishing activities.

The Brits are Snapping Up eBooks

Amazon UK recently announced that Kindle eBook sales have outperformed their print siblings. Even though they remain secretive about their figures for digital book sales, Amazon stressed the fact that Kindle users have bought four times more books than prior to owning the eReading devices.

eBook Prices - How Low Can They Go?

Price Going Down

eBook prices have gone down in 2012 according to a Bowker Market Research report. Fiction’s average price is lower than in the previous year from $5.69 in 2010 to $5.24 in 2011. For non-fiction, the dramatic decline was even more intense from $9.04 to $6.47. It should be noted that Gen Y youngsters are overtaking Baby Boomers for eBook consumption. This may explain why cheaper eBooks are more attractive.

New Startup Supports Indie Authors and Readers

Storybundle is a startup that offers a distinguished opportunity for customers to support indie authors in large quantities. Customers must spend at least $1 per book, but they are allowed to contribute more generously either to the authors or the site, as well as a charity of choice. Spending at least $7, customers will be eligible to get bonus books featured on the bundle deal. One nice thing about Storybundle is that they do not have any of the much-despised DRM on their eBooks. How cool is that?

Web-Based Thai eBooks at Our Site

Web Based Thai eBook Example

Our continued effort to publish Thai eBooks was fulfilled last week when we published three poems written by Thai UNESCO-honored poet, Sunthorn Phu. Although our Thai eBook could not be properly displayed on the latest Adobe Digital Editions, the collection of three poems looks decent across web browsers and Kindle software. We are striving to fix the Thai font incompatibility and will keep you updated regularly. Also, we are very keen to cover the growth of eBook market in Thailand in the wake of One Tablet per Child policy and the rise of online bookstores. Read the full article here for more details.

Nerds Ahoy! All About Regular Expressions

After hearing that well-known author JW Manus was trying to add paragraph HTML elements one at a time (a grueling task) to her eBook, we compiled a 5,000-word tutorial on regular expressions. These things are a bit geeky and challenging to get the hang of, but they will let you perform eBook development quickly and error-free. Come check out the tutorial right here.

Word of the Day

CSS Words

CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets for those not into the whole brevity thing) is a method to add presentational rules to your source files. These rules are linked within the HTML file to define how the marked-up content appears to the reader. The rules are also known as declarations to signify formatting features such as font size, text alignment, margin values, and paragraph values. For sophisticated presentational rules, it is strongly recommended to save CSS rules as an individual file as opposed to defining the rules in the head section of HTML file to make your life easier.

Client Spotlight

3 Chips on God Promo

Preeti Gupta is self-publishing her first eBook, I’ll Put 3 Chips on God, and it is a non-fiction book with a rather complex layout. She wanted to have it online quickly via Kindle Direct Publishing so she could start her marketing campaign. We think that the following testimonial speaks for itself:

I tried 2 other eBook conversion services, one in the US, and one abroad. They either gave me horrible formatting that was buggy in various fonts and devices, or they were slow to respond and didn’t seem to be able to handle the complexity of my book. Paul and BB eBooks were absolutely amazing, very professional, with high-quality work that was not only bug-free, but beautifully formatted as well. They did an outstanding job and I highly recommend them to everyone!