I’m Just Loving them Ebooks! (laptop, hard drive, screen, 80gb)

[JTE1969]

Being 6 years unemployed now, I have to think about alternate ways to make money, so why not Freelance and write a book too! I’ve applied for ten 3d Cad Projects on Elance so far but no bites. So while I wait to get Freelance work I will be busy writing an ebook for Kindle, IPad, and Nook. I’m still researching on how to write an ebook, but it seems I might buy this book because it might have all the info I need, see: Self-Publishing Secrets -- book information

Anyone know of a better guide to writing an ebook?

Also, I’m brainstorming new topics of books to write about, but one thing I don’t have is a knack for writing creative fiction books or a novel. Something like Harry Potter or The Hobbit. Yeah, some people can get rich writing books!

Anyway, I’m also a big fan of buying / collecting ebooks. Pdfs are my favorite format, otherwise I like buying Amazon Kindle books. I try to get an ebook version as much as possible, because you can just load up a usb drive with 80GB of pdfs / ebooks and that would equal a whole house of books!

The problem with writing an ebook is piracy! There is a great engineering CAD textbook that cost $180 print but it’s big and thick, and I’d rather have an ebook version of it from Amazon Kindle but I’m afraid the author is afraid of piracy. Because anyone can buy the Amazon Kindle book, then from their computer they can publish the mobi file to a torrent. Or before publishing it to torrent they can convert the mobi to pdf or epub. So piracy can happen to any book I write too! To combat piracy, I will put a page on my ebook linking to my website for Paypal or credit card donations, in case they pirated my book, liked it, and wanted to give me some compensation for my ebook. I will also publish a pdf sample of my books to torrent, but it will be a book sample – all the Table of Contents will be shown with some chapters as a sample. Then it would link to my website.

Anyway, the ebook topics I like are Catholic Religious books, Computer Science books, and Mechanical Engineering books. I don’t waste my time reading fiction books, not even Harry Potter. Other books are Investing, Bicycling, WW 2 / Combat / Airplane books, and some Hobbies. What ebook topics are you into?

Why do I like ebooks so much? Because they take up no space except for hard drive / usb stick space! Plus I would read an entire library of books from a laptop or computer / big computer screen! Having too many print books is a big hassle! The future is ebooks! I bought two book scanners and tried to convert some of my print books to pdf but it take so much time!

And is there anything such as ebook drm? Even Amazon Kindle books can be pirated, and I always thought Amazon Kindle had drm.

[metroxian]

Take a look at Smashwords. They have a system for self publishing with distribution to retailers.

Smashwords is the world's largest distributor of indie ebooks. We make it fast, free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to publish and distribute ebooks to the major retailers.

They include instructions on formatting your document and how to get cover art. Follow the directions and all the options are yours. Set your own price and also gets an ISBN number.

[timfountain]

Surely the most important thing here is to be a good, creative writer with lots of ideas for new titles? The medium is just that. It's the content that matters....