Ebook Publishing Part 2

We had about 35 people attend the St. Louis Publishers Association meeting last night, where Bob Baker and I presented the topic of getting your ebook published. The presentation went well, and the feedback on the SLPA facebook page has been quite positive. As a followup to my last post, there still is little information on the internet about the KF8 format that will be required for any ebooks sold for the new Kindle Fire. My best advice is that if you have an ebook ready to go, begin with all the other e-reading devices and have your book formatted for them. After all, that is still a huge market and not everyone is going to rush right out and get the new Fire.

Especially since the new Nook Color is also due to be released this month. Designed to directly compete with the Fire, the new Nook will be slightly higher priced than the Fire but will offer more amenities, including a longer battery life and larger storage capacity. The Christmas sales season should prove interesting!

My house history website is still down! I had emailed axspace and requested that they put everything back the way it was just to get the site back up. That was over a week ago. Tuesday I opened a new ticket with them, again asking that they change the website to its original format. This is the response I got at 4:18 this morning:

Hi,

Please accept our apology in this regard,
Would you please let us know if you tend to change back your domain to "myhousehistory.axspace.com" ?

Thanks,
AXSpace support. 

You see what I am dealing with here? Wasn't that what I said - to change it back? Ugh! I can't wait to get this all straightened out and then yank my website away from them. Stay tuned...

Ebook Publishing

This month's St. Louis Publishers Association meeting is Ebooks Demystified, and Bob Baker and I are the presenters since we both have published ebooks. Bob is out of town in California so we have not been able to compare notes on who is covering what. But I am confident it will all come together nicely.

The one thing throwing a bit of a wrench into the program is the new Kindle Fire. Amazon could not leave well enough alone and use the same ebook format for the Fire as is used on the other Kindles. No, they had to come up with a new format called the KF8. While I'm sure this new format will result in a nicer, more interactive ebook, Amazon has not yet said if books formatted for the old Kindles will work on the Fire. Nor have they released the specs for the new format since the Fire doesn't arrive until later this month.

So in the meantime if you are getting ready to produce an ebook do you format for the old Kindles? Or do you wait for the KF8? The ebooks for the Fire will not be readable on any of the other devices, I don't believe. Hopefully I can get some answers before Wednesday night.