If you are thinking of getting into this digital foray, one of the most daunting tasks that you will come across is identifying the right format for your eBook. This is partly because there are far too many formats out there, each with its pros and cons. The fact that there are so many formats is not necessarily helpful, because authors and publishers now have to deal with the perplexity of trying to understand which format would work best for their audience.

However, it’s also important to understand that the variety is also a good thing considering that consumers now use different devices to read these electronic books. The marketplace has also become quite crowded with different publishers selling apps that help display books; this feature does simplify the job but for selected eBook readers. However, it doesn’t do much to help those looking to build electronic libraries.

According to an article by the NY Times, the proliferation of eBook formats has brought about glut of formats, software programs and hardware. This is why you will find self published writers, such as Steve Jordan, offering different eBook formats on their websites. Most publishers are casting their nets wide in similar format.

Important Considerations

eBooks can be thought of as tiny websites. Readers are, therefore, mainly concerned with the navigation. Unlike printed books which have static content, eBooks need to allow the text to flow, regardless of the device being used by the reader.

Some of the important things you need to think about when it comes to the format for digital publication are:

• The eBook’s marketing platform
• The design
• The reading device
• The location of the readers
• DRM

We begin with the marketing platform which plays one of the most important roles when deciding which format to use. Many of the marketing platforms that sell your eBook already have formats that they accept. It, in other words, means that you might be limited to those formats. A good example is Amazon, which happens to have the lion’s share of the eBook market.

According to their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Amazon also accepts eBooks in the Word, HTML (ZIP, HTM, HTML), ePub, MOBI, Rich Text Format (RFT), Adobe PDF and Plain Text (TXT).

When it comes to design, you need to ensure that you meet the flexibility requirements of the reader. You will find that different readers have their different displays as far as the font, size and even spacing is concerned. It’s important to consider the flexibility of the eBooks design because you want the person reading it from a cell phone to have the same experience as one using a tablet, e-reader or desktop screen.

You also need to consider the device being used to read the digital books because different devices will have formats that they work with best. It helps a great deal if you conduct some research on the formats that are recommended for different devices. This exercise makes it much easier for you to proceed and decide on the best format for your eBook.

This is not something we hear often but location matters.

Why? Because some formats may not be supported in your location.
As you will soon find out, many publishers insist on digital rights management (DRM). DRM has the ability to prevent a reader from reading the eBook even if the e-reader is compatible with the book format.

The reason why authors insist on DRM is to avoid the losses. This is understandable, bearing in mind, the major losses that have been experienced in the movie and music industries, due to piracy.

Overview of eBook Formats

Wikipedia has come up with an extensive list of 31 eBook formats. We highlight those that are still in use today. These are:

Archos Diffusion

This French developed format is XML based and uses a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology and encryption that allows the eBook to be readable using the Archos Player only. However, it does support a good number of interactive functions including bookmarking, dynamic text highlighting and others. It also supports multiple input formats such as MP3, PDF and others.

Broadband eBooks (BBeB)

This is a Sony proprietary format that uses the LRX extension file. BBeB is quite popular with readers and it also helps that the format can be converted to EPUB. The interesting thing to note about this format is that some reader software programs such as calibre’s internal viewer, which runs under Linux, can read it.

Comic Book Archive File

If you are looking to publish a comic book, this is the format for you. It’s designed to provide chronological image views, particularly in comic books. The files are published in archive format which helps the reader access the comic book files with great ease. The format supports various comic format files and these include: .cbr (RAR), cb7 (7z), .cba (ACE). This format also allows readers to convert the comic into common image formats such as jpg/jpeg, bmp and other image formats.

Compiled HTML

The CHM format is a HTML based Microsoft proprietary format. The eBooks is distributed as a single compressed file and unlike HTML, this format incorporates various HTML and image files using standardized formats.

Daisy

Daisy stands for Digital Accessible Information System and it is an XML based open format. The eBook format is internationally supported with navigation, synchronization and multimedia features. The format is also compatible with EPUB’s open standards. It also will converge fully with the impending EPUB3.

DjVu

DjVu is designed for scanned documents and one of its major advantages of this format is that you can take high resolution scans which are suitable for digital screens and print. The format has been designed with advanced compressors that can accommodate images and text. It can also decompress quite fast.

Doc

Not to be confused with DOCX, this is one of the most versatile formats we have since it is supported by most eBook readers. The document file format makes it easy for tasks, such as editing and conversions, to other formats to be undertaken easily which increases wider support.

DOCX

DOCX is yet another document file format that offers the same appeal as DOC.

EPUB

This is one of the most loved formats by readers and its’ popularity can be credited to its wide compatibility as it can be supported by various e-readers and desktop reader software programs as well. However, the format is not supported by Amazon Kindle. That said, there are programs that can covert the format to a Kindle format. This is a free, open source format.

eReader

eReader is a free format that uses the pdf format. The format provides an experience similar to print books showing only page at a time. It supports images and embedded hyperlinks, footnotes, and bookmarks. The eBook format is available in multiple operating system versions.

FictionBook (Fb2)

This XML based format is convenient as it can be converted to multiple formats. Free readers that support the book format include: CoolReader, Okular and FBReader, just to mention a few. The format includes metadata such as the author’s name, title and the publisher as well making it a great eBook file for managing one’s collection.

Founder Electronics

APABI is quite popular with Chinese eBooks and this format is only read using Apabi Reader.

Hypertext Markup Language

eBooks that use HTML are versatile and can be read using web browsers. The markup language which is used by most web pages is an efficient format when it comes to storing information. HTML files have various displays and standards which could make it complicated to display the files correctly. Some of the features also may not be relevant to eBooks. In fact, various eBook formats such as Kindle and EPUB store their chapters in HTML format before using ZIP compression to compress the data to make the file smaller.

iBook

This Apple Inc. proprietary format uses EPUB standards, making it compatible with the open standard. The format is designed with iBooks Author which is free and the End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) only allows distribution using Apple’s iBook store. However, this restriction does not extend to other converted formats and this means that you can sell reformatted content outside the Apple bookstore.

IEC 62448:2013

This is the International Electrotecnical Commission (IEC) standard that specifies its generic e-publishing multimedia eBooks. The format has had a number of issues but its designers say that is designed to satisfy the publishers needs with its flexible structure.

Kindle

The latest Kindle format supports various CSS3 and HTML5 features. The format has its exclusive DRM format primarily because eBooks using this format are delivered through Whispernet which is a wireless system. Unlike previous formats, this format also has its own serial number as well. It is available on various platforms.

Mobi Pocket

This eBook format uses XHTML and it is an Open eBook based format. The format supports most operating systems including Windows, Blackberry, Palm and Symbian but not Android.

Multimedia eBooks

This format combines multiple eBook formats and readers get a good combination of images, text, audio, video and interactive formats too.

Newton eBook

This format popularly known as Apple Newton books runs on the Newton operating system. This system does not support encryption or DRM, internal links and other scripting capabilities. However, the format can be viewed in multiple ways.

Open Electronic Package

This XML based format which is published as .opf is replaced by EPUB’s electronic publication standard.

PDF

Portable Document Format (PDF) was designed by Adobe Systems to provide users with a platform that is independent. The format is used by many publishers due to its ease in usability. However, it does have some restrictions and does not always render appropriately for different devices, making its render-ability its major challenge. The good news is that PDF is supported by most if not all e-book readers, Smartphones and tablets.

Plain Text

This is by far the most flexible format we have in the market. It can used by various operating systems and can be read using any word processor. However, the format does not support DRM.

Plucker

Published as .pdb, Plucker is a format that comes with its unique file format that can generate files from pdf, text, HTML and other forms. The free Open Source platform supports DRM.

Post Script

Post Script uses both electronic and desktop publishing and is widely supported by Unix which is a multi-user operating system. The format is widely supported by most printers.

RTF

Rich Text Format is a published as .pdg and this format is used in several Chinese digital libraries. In fact, many Chinese books in the country’s national library have been scanned using this format.

TEBR

This eBook format is mainly designed for mobile devices and, there is a Windows version available. The format allows publishers to compress and encrypt data but does not allow conversions.

Text Encoding Initiative

This XML and SML based format is the most utilized TEI based format. The format differs greatly from HTML and OpenDocument because of its semantics and its interpretation of tags.

TomeRaider

This is a proprietary format that comes with versions for iPhone, Windows, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm. The capabilities of the format differ depending on the platform used. For example, Windows editions can support CSS and HTML while with Pal only HTML is supported. Despite its differences, this eBook format is supported across all platforms and it can support DRM.

Open XPS

Also referred to as Open XML Paper Specification, this open format was developed by Microsoft as XML Paper Specification. The format greatly reduces the likelihood of introducing malicious content and also makes it easier for the publisher to implement compatible renderers. The format is restricted to the following sequences: Brushes, Paths and Glyphs. It is supported by Android and Apple devices, but it’s not clear if the format supports DRM.

As you can see, different formats have their different specifications making it very important for you to be aware of what each does.

If you are looking for a compatible format for your eBook, this post has all the information you need. With an extensive list of about 30 eBook formats, you are not short of information. If you are looking to sell your eBook online feel free to try Instabuck, the hassle free way to sell digital products online with 0% commissions.

Keep it Simple

Although all companies want a useful and attractive webpage, don’t try too hard to make your webpage flashy or over the top. Having a webpage that is too cluttered may overwhelm your visitors and they may not find what they are looking for. Sometimes less is more. Include only the information your visitors need to make a decision, and make it as clean and well-formatted as possible. Use bullets and short paragraphs to help organize the text. Many people want information as quickly as possible. Having to read through pages of information will be enough for someone to click out of your page and take their business elsewhere.

Help with the Navigation

Most visitors land on your page after clicking a link from an e-mail message or another website. Having the name of your webpage clearly labeled at the top will help assure visitors that they are at the right place. You may even want to include the name of the product you are selling in the title for even better page recognition.

Make Buying the Product Easy

Don’t just link to your product or service once and be done with it. Some people take longer than others to make the decision to buy. Include links at the top of the page, as well as the middle and bottom. That way, customers will have many opportunities to buy the product without having to scroll up or down to figure out how to buy the product. You definitely don’t want to lose a potential customer because they couldn’t figure out how to make a purchase. To further your page’s effectiveness, you may want to track how many customers click each link, so you can see which links are the most effective.

Optimize Your Registration Forms

If the goal of your website is to get someone to sign up for a newsletter or to request more information, then make the form short and sweet. Most people hate taking the time to fill out lengthy forms, so only include the fields that are necessary. Usually a name, address and phone number or e-mail address will do. In fact, try not to even ask for a phone number. Many people don’t feel comfortable offering it if they think they may get pressured into a sales call. Most people feel comfortable with e-mail contact only, especially in the beginning stages of making a decision. Don’t ask for personal information, such as income level, marital status, gender, ethnicity, Social Security Number or credit card information.

Don’t Stop at One Offer

After a customer fills out an online form or buys a product, you may think you’re done. Well, the truth is, you’re never done marketing your products or services. Take it one step further. After someone makes a transaction on your website, take your marketing a step further. Offer more products that person may be interested in. Add a link where they can sign up for another newsletter. You can even offer a discount on future purchases. Find ways to keep them coming back.

Test your ideas

There are so many ways that you can market your product, but only one to find out what works and that’s testing. Try different layouts, words, prices or anything that could help you realise what works for your audience. AB testing could be a good tool for this.

There are many reasons for this. First of all Bitcoin is the only truly international currency, has almost no fees for transactions and on the merchant’s side is good as it has no chargebacks. In addition to that as more and more startups dig into this thing its obvious that Bitcoin is here to stay.

So why not selling our products with Bitcoins?

Today we are very glad to announce that we are the first service that gives you the ability to sell your digital products using Bitcoins.

How to use Bitcoins with Instabuck

To start selling in Bitcoins you have to go to your Settings page and select one of the two BTC options:

The difference is that in the first option you just receive Bitcoins in a BTC address you choose while in the second one you can use Bitpay and use the additional benefits they offer.

That’s all. After that you’ll be able to sell in BTC. Our system takes care of the rest so you won’t have to worry about currency exchanges, etc.

So what do you think? Will you use that new feature? And what about Bitcoin, is it a bubble or is it here to stay?

Sometimes due to slow net connectivity or just because you are on mobile, you can’t save the file you bought. It was a challenge for us to deal with this deficiency. Thankfully the cloud is solving this problem and here is how we worked around the problem.

So from now on your Instabuck customers will be able to save the products they buy in their Dropbox account. Later we will expand this feature by adding more cloud storage providers.

In the meanwhile let us know if you like this new feature.

So we thought it would be cool to add coupons in Instabuck and help you promote your products this way.

Creating a discount coupon

Let’s create a coupon to see how it works. Under the More tab click on Coupons. As it is your first time you’ll be asked to enter the details for your first coupon:

Please mention that you can even use a zero price, meaning that you can create coupons in order to give away your product for free. Then you’ll be able to examine what happened by viewing the stats of your coupons. Here is a screenshot:

Please let us know how this new feature work for you, and stay tuned as more selling tools are coming soon

As it seems a big portion of our users like to use Instabuck from their iPhones and iPads so we had to give them a better mobile experience.

The easy way to sell digital products becomes mobile

At VentureGeeks we have a saying: “Internet business is real time business”. That means you always need the fastest way to perform tasks, and for Instabuck having the whole experience in iOS was a no brainer.

So here is what you can do with our new iOS app:

• Create products using Dropbox
• Check your sales statistics
• Share your product on Facebook, Twitter and email using the native apps
• Get push notifications whenever someone buys your products
• Check your AB tests statistics in real time

Here is a preview video:

Feel free to download it and please let us know how do you like it.

What seems to be the problem?

In our time music is no more a commodity. Actually it never was and never should be, but that’s another topic. People no longer buy CDs and it’s very easy to access all the music of the world for the price of zero.

But many still buy music or merchandise from bands. The reason is simple, people need to support bands that really really like.
That’s a fact for sure, and bands who do that are actually the ones that are able to have some short of connection with the audience.

That’s a problem that no marketplace is going to solve for the bands. What the bands really need is to connect with their audience through social media and then give them an easy way to help them out.

The old model

Music labels around the world were traditionally working as a sales channel. They could give you access to distribution so your album could reach a world wide audience.

Of course this changed by the iTunes launch, but is it enough? iTunes is just a digital way to perform the same old model, which is not relevant anymore as it’s basic feature, the sales channel, is no longer a big deal for musicians. At least for the majority of them.

Would you buy an album from a band that is similar to a band you like? Probably not. You didn’t buy the album just to have it in the first place. You bought it because you want to support the group. So all that fancy music discovery features simply don’t make any sense.

So what’s the future you might ask

We believe that in the future there will be no big stars, or at least not so many as in the past. Musicians will make a living by their community management skills. That would be their sales channel and their product will still be their music, but only on a voluntary purchase basis. Additionally bands will make money from merchandise and tickets for their gigs.

In that democratised scenario record labels will be a totally different thing than it is now. Labels will help bands with social media and their digital presence in general. They will also arrange booking and stuff. So in general labels will act as digital PR agencies with a part of management.

In that terms maybe it will be fair for labels to get a small percentage of the income, and bands will be able to fire them as it happens in the real world.

Instabuck is a part of this future as everyone will need a solution to sell outside the marketplaces using social media. We believe that this is an idea that can get the music industry forward.

What do you think? Will you help us make music cool as it was before?

We’ve choose Stripe as it is very popular among developers and it has a great set of features like direct payouts to your bank account, low fees, etc.

How to use Stripe to sell your digital product

First of all you will need to register an account here. Make sure to activate it before doing anything else. After the activation you will be asked to enter your payment details. Then go to Your Account -> Account Details and choose the API keys tab. It will look like this:

Just copy your Live Secret and Publishable keys to the settings page in Instabuck and you are done!

Here is how your order page will look like afterwards:

That’s all, now you can directly charge credit cards for your digital products. Let us know how does this new feature works for you. Is there any other payment processor you would like to see in the service?

* Currently the Stripe service is available only in US dollars, so please use a price tag in dollars if you want to use this feature. We will update the post when Stripe will take care of this minor issue.

Dropbox integration with Instabuck

We thought that FTP won’t be the best way to solve this problem, as it is too technical for some people so we’ve used Dropbox. What you can have with this new feature?

• Upload your products using Dropbox without worrying about speed and connection issues.
• Whenever you update the file in your Dropbox folder, your product is updated.
• With this way you also keep an extra backup of your work

Here is a video demonstrating how it works.

If you have any questions or suggestions please let us know in the comments below, or drop us a line.

Writing as a passion is fulfilled when you pen down your thoughts on papers but selling the same is not easy. People who love to read online books, also called eBooks, look for a book which is priced according to its value or the content it holds.

That is why targeting right price is important to successfully sell your valuable product. If you charge too less, people will think it’s of little value or contains frivolous kind of material, and they won’t simply buy it and even if many people do buy your book, to seek profits you shall have to sell various copies which means more marketing and shelling out money online. But on the contrary if the price it too high when compared with the competition, you shall end up yourself steadily lowering the price, not attaining the break-even stage.

So you may want to adopt the following strategies to price your ebook.

Never underprice your ebook

And look for the goal that you want to achieve by selling it online. If your aim is to penetrate the market by selling your ebooks in volume and establish market dominance, then you need to price your product low compared to the competitors. The trick is to fix a price that maximizes profits and number of ebooks sold. One can acquire as many customers as possible and maintain a lifetime relationship with them.  The advantage is that an existing customer buys from you again. In fact, it has been observed that more than 80% of first time customers buy a second product from the same source. This is especially true if the first product which was bought was considered valuable by them and offered to them at a justified price.

Premium pricing strategy

Premium pricing strategy prices the ebook high to gain more profits and every sale brings an extra calculated money at the expense of fewer customers thus creating a smaller market share. But pricing high would only be good if it really contains information that people would like to know about including facts, figures, opinions etc. If price is not justified, it could be the last ebook you would write forever.

The number game

It is often believed that the price of any product should end with a 5, 7, 8 or 9. And never end in a 0 or 1. Doesn’t 599 sound better than 600 and even more realistic? One should not forget that humans buy on emotion first and then justify their buying decision with a rational explanation afterwards!

Look out for competition

Compare your ebook with another ebook of similar nature and category and find its price. On the basis of competition and information it contains, price a little higher or lower and sell it.

You can surely try these above measures and price your ebook accordingly.