Ebook Concerns

It has been widely reported that Amazon will stop allowing users to download ebooks purchased through their Amazon Kindle Store for backup. Since I am currently exclusively publishing through Amazon, this bothers me. I do not want my readers to risk losing access to my books simply because they no longer wish to use Amazon as their ebook source, because Amazon has decided to stop publishing independent writers, or any other reason that could cause a reader to no longer have access to the Amazon servers.

I have other options to pursue. I can look at the agreements I used with Kindle Direct Publishing and act to ensure that I have, or can recover, my rights to publish my books elsewhere. This will have the advantage of allowing me to sell at least the ebooks through other venues. I might even be able to locate an additional print-on-demand service that will make it easier, or more profitable, for me to make my works available to brick-and-mortar bookstores and convention resellers.

I also could consider selling ebooks directly through this site (ronoakes.com and randallfox.info). However, that would require some additional steps to properly collect taxes across all of the places where I might make sales.

There are additional expenses and efforts that I would have to incur if I move away from using Kindle Direct Publishing as my exclusive distributor.

The most immediate would be that I would need to acquire ISBNs. In the United States, where I live and publish, these cost $125 for an individual ISBN or $295 for 10—that is $29.50 per ISBN if purchased ten at a time. With eight books currently in print, each requiring two ISBNs and another nearing completion, that is an expense of nearly $600—at which point I might as well get 100 ISBNs for $575. (I could point out that Bowker, who sells ISBNs in this country, clearly is running a racket if they can discount them down to $5.75 from $125 for bulk purchases.)

I will also have to learn how to make my own paperback book covers. Currently, I use the cover creator part of Kindle Direct Publishing to build the paperback cover from the art I’ve created in DazStudio and then use Paint.NET to add the titles. This should not be hard to do. I will need to expand the canvas in the Paint.NET and add the back cover. However, some adjustments are required in order to account for the spine width and get the canvas size correct, making it far from a trivial operation.

Finally, if I am not using Kindle Direct Publishing, I might want to move away from using Kindle Create as my tool for creating epub books. This last step might be less important since it exports both the package format that KDP prefers and the raw epub format, but it might help generate files that can be sent to other print-on-demand publishers.