My Tablet Books Launches Illustrated E-Bookstore
(PRESS RELEASE) Louisville, Ky.—MyTabletBooks.com, a division of Four Colour Print Group, announces the first eBookstore dedicated to delivering premium quality illustrated eBooks to consumers, where publishers and authors can sell eBooks directly to the public, bypassing Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, or Google.
While simple fiction and non-fiction books have proven their commercial viability on black and white e-readers like Amazon's Kindle, the market for full-color, heavily designed and illustrated books is still largely untested. Illustrated eBooks are more difficult and expensive to create, and when printed versions are carelessly converted to .ePub format, they lose much of their usability and appeal. MyTabletBooks.com was created specifically as the preferred website where buyers shop for illustrated eBooks, knowing they can depend on the quality of the product.
Four Colour Print Group carefully handles .ePub conversions of illustrated books from the publisher's print design files, making sure image data is captured and displayed at the optimal screen resolution, and that all image tagging, indexing, and anchoring gives the reader a positive experience, regardless of .ePub viewing device. Reformatting is handled during conversion when necessary. Four Colour has partnered with .ePub conversion specialists in India to keep the cost low, while securely managing all traffic and quality control from their prepress division FCI Digital in West Carrolton, Ohio.
While the iPad currently leads the market in sales of color tablets, the announcement of the lower priced Kindle Fire heats up the competition, along with Nook Color and Samsung Galaxy. As well, 25% of all eBooks are still viewed on Laptop PCs, such as the free eBook reader Adobe Digital Editions or a plug-in to the Mozilla Firefox web browser. To get around the challenges presented by the different capabilities and screen size of the various electronic devices, and to allow consumers to read eBooks in their preferred electronic format, MyTabletBooks.com offers buyers a selection of eBook formats to purchase. These include standard .epub, fixed layout .epub, .mobi, PDF, flash based PDF flip-books, and additional formats as they are developed.
For publishers wanting to protect their copyrighted content through the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM), MyTabletBooks offers the industry standard Adobe Content Server. Publishers pay an additional fee for downloads of DRM protected eBooks. Currently, the difficulty and high cost of implementing DRM has been an impediment for independent publishers and authors wishing to sell and deliver eBooks directly from their own websites, which MyTabletBooks overcomes.
With Borders bankruptcy and the loss of so many other brick and mortar bookstores, it will become harder for publishers of illustrated books to gain awareness of their titles. Gone will be the impulse purchase of bookstore browsers walking past aisles or tables featuring illustrated gift books. Modern eBook marketing requires publishers to create awareness of their products through their own websites, emails, blogging, and social networking.
Given that scenario, George Dick ,CEO of MyTabletBooks believes publishers are foolish to send shoppers to a large eBook retailer like Amazon, Apple or Google, where they can become distracted, or easily begin searching for a competitor's product. Instead, MyTabletBooks offers each publisher their own custom branded webstore contained within the site. Publishers electronically link to a webpage displaying only the publisher's titles, giving the shopper the experience of buying "direct". Special promotions and discounts offered by the publisher can be applied at checkout.
"Whereas buying eBooks from the major retailers is similar to a bewildering trip to a giant mall, MyTabletBooks replicates the experience of buying from a Direct Outlet store", explains Dick. "Publishers also set their own prices, rather than having the store dictate prices to them."
The icing on the cake for publishers is that MyTabletBooks only charges 20% for handling the eBook sales transaction, and there is no file transfer fee (which can be considerable in the case of heavily illustrated books with large file sizes.) Not only do publishers save 33% of the fees charged by the better known stores (who charge 30% commission), publishers also have access to all the invaluable customer data which is not available from the major eBook online retailers.
"Knowing who your customers are, and being able to market more products to them, is vital to a publisher's long-term success", believes Dick.
MyTabletBooks will offer an affiliate program to independent bookstores, allowing them to participate in the profits of eBooks that they direct their customers to purchase, either from the bookstore's own website or from in-store referrals made on behalf of their customers using a special discount code.
"Bookstores are not going to disappear entirely, nor are beautifully printed and bound illustrated books", says Dick. In fact, eBook sales and free eBook previews can spur demand for the printed version, available directly from the publisher, or distributor, or retail bookshop. While traditional offset printing of illustrated books, such as that done by Four Colour Print Group still dominates the market for hard copy delivery; in the future digital printing technology may allow cost-effective "on-demand" production of these titles…all due to the initial eBook sale.
"Times, they are a-changing," (to quote Bob Dylan), and "we are enabling illustrated books publishers to participate in that future", Dick concludes.
- People:
- George Dick
- Places:
- LOUISVILLE, KY