Thursday, July 28, 2005
No Shortcuts
I've had a couple of ebooks to which I had been offered free reprint rights tucked away. I wanted to add them to the collection of free ebooks available for downloading on my site. These new, three ebooks were done by people I think highly of and I figured the books would be useful to users of One Stop Web Support. Today I was going to put them up. But first I wanted to check them just to be sure they were what I expected.
I was disappointed. One of the three was written in 2000. Lots of links were outdated and the book was pretty much useless.
Ebook number two was more useful, but was done in one of those funky ebook software programs that break the ebook into separate minipages and requires you to hunt around the page to find the link to the next one. Considering that the material itself is in the public domain and available for anyone to reprint, it seemed foolish to make readers jump through hoops to read it in funky format designed to make it hard for people to copy it.
Ebook number three wasn't quite what I was looking for, but looks useful. It's a 14-page mini-ebook on one, specific promotion method. I wasn't particularly looking for ebooks that are that specialized—most of the current ebooks I have available are more general and more geared toward starting a business, but it should fit in nonetheless. That one will go up sometime this week.
I also considered buying reprint rights to an ebook I think highly of—a how-to guide offering step-by-step instructions to starting a site—but couldn't shake the nagging feeling that I could create a similar ebook based on my own insights—and covering some important areas I feel should have been covered more thoroughly in the other book—instead of paying $300 to sell someone else's book.
I guess when it comes to "free," you get what you pay for. The free ebooks I already have on my site are so good and were offered to me so willingly, that I've held out the hope for too long that I could find others of similar caliber. But I guess I have to stop looking and starting putting something together myself.
There are no shortcuts.
Jeff
I've had a couple of ebooks to which I had been offered free reprint rights tucked away. I wanted to add them to the collection of free ebooks available for downloading on my site. These new, three ebooks were done by people I think highly of and I figured the books would be useful to users of One Stop Web Support. Today I was going to put them up. But first I wanted to check them just to be sure they were what I expected.
I was disappointed. One of the three was written in 2000. Lots of links were outdated and the book was pretty much useless.
Ebook number two was more useful, but was done in one of those funky ebook software programs that break the ebook into separate minipages and requires you to hunt around the page to find the link to the next one. Considering that the material itself is in the public domain and available for anyone to reprint, it seemed foolish to make readers jump through hoops to read it in funky format designed to make it hard for people to copy it.
Ebook number three wasn't quite what I was looking for, but looks useful. It's a 14-page mini-ebook on one, specific promotion method. I wasn't particularly looking for ebooks that are that specialized—most of the current ebooks I have available are more general and more geared toward starting a business, but it should fit in nonetheless. That one will go up sometime this week.
I also considered buying reprint rights to an ebook I think highly of—a how-to guide offering step-by-step instructions to starting a site—but couldn't shake the nagging feeling that I could create a similar ebook based on my own insights—and covering some important areas I feel should have been covered more thoroughly in the other book—instead of paying $300 to sell someone else's book.
I guess when it comes to "free," you get what you pay for. The free ebooks I already have on my site are so good and were offered to me so willingly, that I've held out the hope for too long that I could find others of similar caliber. But I guess I have to stop looking and starting putting something together myself.
There are no shortcuts.
Jeff
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