Publish Independently With the Help of Digital Publishing

Even as writers and readers buzz in social media circles about the latest success story and unknown authors continue to leverage success through digital releases, the traditional publishing world has still been hesitant to jump fully on board.

Fortunately, many marketers and self-help gurus are leading the way with aggressive digitization of their books into e-books and offering them at heavy discounts (sometimes even for free!) which increasingly evens out the playing field in favor of independent authors exploiting the benefits of digital publishing.

Taking the cue from these digital publishing trailblazers, you should definitely exploit this digital format and ride the digital publishing wave. Here's the low-down on the digital publishing trend and how you can take advantage.

Advantages of e-books and e-readers

With wave after wave of portable reading gadgets flooding the market, technology has just become the reader's best friend. Each brand boast their respective advantages: Apple's iPad leads the charge with retina display technology that literally mimics the eye; while Amazon's Kindle and Barne's & Noble's Nook readers embraced digital ink technology which offer glare-free displays that shun backlights and promise to be friendlier to the eyes.

For authors, the game changer is the ease at which your book can be shared and promoted. Especially wonderful is that many e-book retailers allow readers to download enough of the text to get hooked, anytime, anywhere.

E-books are quite easy to figure out, even your average reader will find it intuitive enough to obtain and use. You need only download those promotional Portable Document Format documents (PDFs) in exchange for an e-mail address or head over to the distributor of your choice, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple. But for the voracious reader or author, things can get a bit more challenging and confusing. What we are seeing in digital publishing today is reminiscent of digital audio in the early 2000s: a multitude of competing formats vying for the attention of a number of platform-specific devices.

What You Need to Know About Digital Formats

The International Digital Publishing Forum recommended the EPUB as "the" standard for digital publishing. However, there has been no overriding consensus among the different digital media producers throughout the years. Formats come and go, as evidenced by Microsoft's LIT, one of the earlier formats that has fallen into disuse, save for specialty areas such as science or utilitarian formats, such as Microsoft Office document formats PDF and web-style HTML.

WhatâEUR(TM)s the problem?

Keep in mind that static formats like PDFs or word documents usually donâEUR(TM)t translate well to portable devices due to display ratio, as anyone who has tried to open one on their smartphone can attest. The key is that e-books should work like web pages and utilize separate files to display content and color. There are no page breaks, so the content streams freely, giving an uninterrupted flow, and are easily resized.

Pads, Pods, Nooks, and Kindles-oh my!

Now, toss into the menagerie the penchant for corporations to favor proprietary technology, and the plot only thickens. The simplest way to get to the bottom of this is to list which formats the major e-book readers support:

âEUR¢ The Amazon Kindle supports AZW, TPZ, TXT, MOBI, PRC and PDF natively, HTML and DOC through conversion.

âEUR¢ AppleâEUR(TM)s iPad or other tablets can handle EPUB, PDF, HTML, DOC, plus iPad Apps, which could include Kindle and Barnes & Noble readers.

âEUR¢ The Barnes & Noble Nook can read EPUB, PDB, PDF.
Everybody supports EPUB as their primary e-book format, except for AmazonâEUR(TM)s Kindle. This is very important as presently Amazon is arguably the biggest retailer and publisher of digital content.

What about writers?

ItâEUR(TM)s important to know that converting your manuscript to digital format is not a simple matter of drag and drop. Outside of getting really cozy with HTML and CSS so you can accurately translate the formatting and style to the text, itâEUR(TM)s best to hire a professional service, which iUniverse provides. Although there are some third-party options that will convert your word document into one of the popular e-book formats, prepare for results that could vary from acceptable to horrid. And while you can always convert your book to PDF, you are ignoring the advantages that book aficionados most love about their dedicated digital reader.

For more writing tips, head over to the iUniverse Writers Tips and learn from the experience of iUniverse self-published authors.