Do I need an ebook?

For most authors, yes. If someone decides they want to read your book tonight, an ebook lets them buy it and start in seconds. And once an ebook has been created, there is no physical copy to print, store, pack or ship each time either.

There is something timeless and beautiful about the feel of paper pages: the smell; the rustle as they turn; the whole experience. Ebooks will never replace that, but they can add to the reading experience in different ways. Just look around you. On trains and buses, coffee shop sofas, holiday resort recliners, everywhere, people are reading books. You'll see many sets of eyes concentrating on iPads, Kindles, and smartphones. You can enlarge the type, read with the built in light and download something new the moment somebody recommends it.

For an author, the attraction is pretty simple. Ebook readers are a huge audience rather than a niche sideline: in the US, around three in ten adults now read ebooks. Believe it or not, readers have nearly 4.5 million new book titles to choose from every single year. Four and a half million! With that kind of demand, we think it's safe to say that reading is as popular as ever. Without the overheads of printing, packing, and shipping, ebooks cost much less to produce than regular books. After your initial investment in a good quality ebook conversion, the only fee you'll pay is the retailers' sales cut, charged by retailers like Amazon, Apple, Google, or Barnes & Noble. Even though you'll sell each printed copy of your book for much more than the ebook, the net profit and author royalties will often be higher for the ebook version.

What an ebook actually is

The clue is in the name with this one. Reflowable ebook content is designed to flow from page to page on any device's screen, perfectly fitting its size. The reader of a reflowable ebook can then adjust settings like the font size, line spacing, margins, and style. Whatever changes you make, the content adapts and reflows to fit. This flexibility means the same book could look very different for different people. On one person's device, it could fill 500 pages, and on another, only 100. The principal format of reflowable ebook is epub. It is used by all major retailers although Amazon will generate their own proprietary format from the epub file. These books are sold through the major ebook stores, where readers download them to their devices or apps.

For most books, the standard ebook works brilliantly

It's important to remember that reflowable ebooks are still by far the most popular type of ebook for good reason. They offer enormous freedom of control to the reader. The files are also small, so customers find them easier, quicker, and cheaper to download and store. Ebooks can include clickable links, for starters, giving you the opportunity to guide readers to supporting information, references, and related websites. The content page lets readers skip straight to the section of their choice, or they can bookmark individual pages, and even make notes. Ebooks are also searchable, making it much simpler and faster to find something compared to skim-reading page after page. Authors pick reflowable ebooks for a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction books, and you can sell them via all ebook retailers.

Creating a good ebook takes more than pressing a button

For text-only books or those with standard in-line images, conversion is typically very affordable, so that's good news. Complex books, however, can be more expensive for you to convert. They'll need many more modifications to make them suitable for the reflowable format. There are many free or low-cost services advertised that will take your written text and convert it into an ebook. It's a fairly brutal process, however. All the attention to spacing, drop caps and fleurons that added character to your printed book will likely get cut altogether. And for a complex non-fiction text that includes images, captions, footnotes, numbering, lists and call-outs? An automatic conversion can leave it all in an alarming mess. A skilled ebook conversion will maintain the character and stylishness of your printed book while adapting it to be flexible enough to work on the widest range of devices. Our reflowable ebook conversion service takes care of that properly.

But not every book works as reflowable

The great advantage of a reflowable ebook is that the page can change. For some books, that is also exactly the problem. A children's picture book may need a sentence beside a particular part of an illustration. A graphic novel depends on its panels. A highly visual cookbook, workbook or technical book may have photographs, instructions, tables and other elements arranged very deliberately on the page. Sometimes a book like this can still be adapted successfully for reflowable reading. Sometimes so much would have to change that the digital version would lose too much of what made the original work. In those cases, it is perfectly reasonable to decide that a conventional ebook is not worthwhile. But there are two other digital options worth considering.

Fixed layout ebooks keep the page design fixed

Fixed layout ebooks, in contrast, keep everything fixed still and unchanging from device to device. They are essential when you want your ebook to have exactly the same look and layout as your printed book. Good examples would be a recipe book or children's book. You can search for and select text in these ebooks, but they're not reflowable. This means the pages do not adapt themselves for each screen, and the reader can't change the font or the font size. What you see on page 25 on one device will be exactly the same as page 25 on all other devices. In a lot of ways, fixed layout ebooks are like a PDF. Technicians generate these files from your print book files by adapting aspects of the book design, pagination, blanks, trim size, links, references and more, to optimize the pages for digital devices. Deciding on fonts for these ebooks means a tough decision between purchasing an expensive ebook font license or swapping everything for a free alternative. Distribution is still more restricted than for reflowable ebooks, since ebook stores and devices are quite particular about the fixed layout formats they support. Our fixed layout ebook design service is designed for exactly these titles.

An ePDF just makes your print pages digital

An ePDF isn't really a proper ebook at all. Instead, as the name suggests, it's simply a type of PDF file, specifically designed to make it easier for people to view on an electronic screen. Online ebook retailers don't sell or distribute them, but that doesn't mean they don't have their uses. ePDFs let you make your own changes to your print files. You could include images in color, or add clickable hyperlinks and an interactive navigation panel. They'll also have exactly the same layout as your printed book, much like a fixed layout ebook. Although readers won't be able to buy them via popular marketplaces, they can still download, save and read them on almost any device via PDF reading apps. However, since each page is effectively one fixed image, these books can be almost impossible to read on smaller devices. What's more, the file size will be significantly bigger, so unless people have a lot of space on their device, they may be put off. Our ePDF design service prepares the print edition specifically for digital use.

So, do you need an ebook?

So, there are your options, each with their own pros and cons. But with all that said, we would still always recommend that you consider a reflowable ebook first, hands down the best user experience for readers. For books where you feel it's vital to fix the layout, a low-cost ePDF is usually the next best option, before fixed layout, which we'd really only recommend for illustrated books with larger text. And occasionally the right answer really is that a particular book is better left in print. Is it all feeling clearer? Now, we won't hold you back from your ebook any longer. Go for it! Our ebook formatting services cover all three options, if you're not sure which route suits your book, send it to us and we can look at what you have, recommend the format that makes sense and prepare the digital edition properly from there.