I must agree with Paul, postage to anywhere outside the UK is just getting silly. The Antipodes and North America are eye-wateringly expensive.
I'm currently weighing up ebooks and print on demand for whatever's next. The problem with the former is colour and having a format that flows (Osprey appear to have cracked it, their Kindle ebooks appear to cope with different screen sizes and font changes to a certain extent. Then there's colour images. I've been watching the colour e-ink ereaders - quite expensive and images look a bit washed out.
There's rumour/gossip/speculation about a colour Kindle.
I must admit I love my Kindle, 1-2kg of my baggage allowance used to be books, now I go offshore with one paper book for reading on the chopper (needs to fit in a survival suit pocket, so no BSPs) and the rest on Kindle. Tellies in cabins killed the rig library, so have to take books. Mind you I always did, you can only read so much Dan Brown.
A few years back Scott and I did some tests with Kindle and found that our beloved drawings only rendered properly if the line weight was set to Chubbi-Stump, thus losing detail. Zooming in wasn't really an option as it was basically a pain in the arse.
Print on demand, my concern is print quality. It's highly variable and I like a quality paper. Oddly enough, this is all a rerun of 2008/9. That ultimately led to hard copy books on quality paper.
Whether it's ebook or POD, a layout/design specialist and editor are required. Good ones (and there's plenty of criticism of layouts and editing on this forum) are hard to find and expensive. I have yet to find a layout/design specialist that is up for trying ebooks.
The other week, a bloke kicked off on the Aviation Enthusiast's Book Club, calling all publishers crooks and saying he was going it alone and would be doing Print-on-demand. I await the results with interest. Especially on the layout, editing and print quality. Then of course, there's security.
Ho hum, time for flakes.
Chris
