by Gurmeet Mattu

Created on: November 20, 2008

What are the requirements for publishing an ebook?
This is the essential question that all potential authors and publishers must ask. And until recently the answers have been limited and limiting.

To begin it would be wise to define precisely what an ebook is. It is commonly accepted that any publication which can be traditionally printed, such as a novel, a collection of short stories, an educational text book or a sales brochure can be electronically repackaged as an ebook.

Originally this would have meant any document generated by a text editor and its word processing descendants, but this only really came into play as a viable publishing method with the appearance of the internet and the ability to distribute an ebook. Desk top publishing applications then introduced the concept of including graphics and photographs within a publication and this was soon adopted by word processing software. The problem remained that the end-user would need to have the same software as the originator to view the publication. This was, in some ways, tempered by originating a publication as a hyper text mark-up language (html) file, which could be viewed in any internet browser. In that sense every web page is an ebook, though generally they are not regarded as such.

The next step came from Adobe who introduced the portable document file (pdf) format. Their business model was to give Acrobat pdf reader away for free, while charging for the software required to create a pdf file. This has, however, failed in that many third party softwares now exist which can transform literally any file into a pdf, and importantly, many are available at no cost. Also importantly pdf files could include many security settings such as denying the ability to print or copy the file. But almost inevitably software appeared which could strip text and images from a pdf file no matter how tightly they were locked. Again, such software could be downloaded for free.

But pdf ebooks still dominate this market and are used as a method of viral marketing rather than as having an intrinsic value in themselves. The publisher really has no option but to use this method as he has no means to secure his publication from piracy, and better to expect the end user to distribute the ebook as a promotional tool than to lose any value it may have had.

The requirements, therefore, for the author and publisher are realisation of value and security.

A relatively new software from an Australian company is Desktop Author (DTA)

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