E-publishing the name itself tells it’s a digital or online publishing that includes e-books, digital magazines, digital libraries, catalogs, blogs, etc. You cannot find these books in retail stores because of the less demand for the printed form by the customers. E-Publication helping new authors to make profits in very less time compared to traditional authors.
As technology developed even customers’ preferences changed, the name e-publishing was started using from 2010 onwards for the online or web-based publications.
As we all know that Amazon e-commerce Company started selling kindles online, now it has grown to the number one e-commerce company providing all kinds of products and services. Jeff Bezos predicted e-publications future in those days itself, recently I have written a case study on How Jeff Bezos has become the world’s richest person, read it if you are interested.
Today we can see many e-publishing happening through websites online which is helping the environment by limiting the usage of papers in turn decreasing the cutting of trees. Apart from online publications even we can see offline publications also in the form of CDs and DVD’s which will help students even if the network is not connected.
In developed countries more than half of the readers have shifted from traditional reading to digital reading, even other countries will soon make this habit as well. So, we can see the opportunities created for online publishers and becoming more popular day by day.
Process of E-Publishing
The electronic publishing still follows some aspects of traditional publishing process but it differs in 2 ways:
- It does not require a printing press to print
- It does not require physical distribution or marketing.
If the content is in printed form it involves a large process from printing to reach the final customer. But when it is in digital form it is easy to access, fast, less third-party intermediaries, etc are the benefits the authors can have. Apart from these, the customer can read on different devices like mobile, tablet, computer as they wish.
Today digital content distribution is happening in various forms due to the advancement in technology such as websites, blogs, videos, PDFs, DVDs, Mobile Apps, etc. The most common file types used for e-books are ePub, PDF, Mobi, Fixed Layout epub, and iBook.
Advantages of E-Publishing
1. It is easy to reach wide audience at short period of time.
2. You can pay online and start reading the books instantly, whereas traditionally you have to wait to get order delivery or you have to go to stores physically.
3. In printed form, if you make a mistake it would have cost you more to reprint and lose a lot of money but in e-publishing, you can edit the mistakes and add more information whenever you needed.
4. This method reduces the cost of production and results in more revenue generation.
5. It is only possible in e-publishing to distribute the samples to people and create interest to read further and convert into sales.
6. Publishing digital content is just a fraction of minutes, so it helps people to get the right information at right time mainly the current events.
7. Here you can experiment with prices and see which pricing strategy is working for you.
8. With less marketing effort you can reach more readers compared to traditional method.
Disadvantages of E-Publishing
1. Even thought the content can be reached worldwide, the sales are less compared to printed form.
2. Because it is in digital form even the selling price will be less.
3. You cannot see the entire book online, but in offline it is possible.
4. People nowadays buy the products online by seeing its review but the fact is many competitors bring you down to sell their products more that may hurt your business.
5. There is security issue where hackers leak the original content on different online platforms to make money and tracking will become difficult.
6. Many readers don’t like reading on digital devices instead they wish to read traditional way.
