ePublisher: an interview

Written on March 19, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl

Today I spoke with Clark Sneed, the national sales manager from Dirxion, LLC, a major eBook publisher. I’d contacted them after receiving a link to an online tourism guide they publish, the 2009 Virginia Guide and being very impressed with its quality and beauty. This example really shows some of the multimedia possibilities of eBooks. As well as a plethora of gorgeous photos, there are embedded videos, links to related eBooks and other websites, a search engine and a way to add bookmarks and notes to your own copy that look like little sticky-notes. When you create a note and go to another page, the note becomes a tab at the edge of the book with the page number, that you can click on to go directly back to that page. The navigation menu (Table of Contents and Search) can be hidden behind a tab on the edge of the page, allowing the flip book to expand to almost the full width of the browser window, and clicking on any page will zoom in or out. You turn pages in a very analog-like manner, by clicking on the corner of the page to go forward or back, or you can specify a page number to jump to in the toolbar, or of course use the navigation menu.

part of a page from the 2009 Virginia Guide at Dirxion

Dirxion eBook webpages include space for banner ads or badges, if you like, so it’s possible to generate revenues on top of book sales. Your eBook can be published on CD-ROM as well as (or instead of) the Web, too, so your sales aren’t limited only to those readers with good internet connections. Dirxion doesn’t handle sales — you need your own ecommerce site, or list your eBook with distributors like Ingram and OverDrive, or distributor-retailers such as Lulu or Ebooks.com, but they can encrypt your eBook for security. They do offer some marketing services, including listing your page with major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN in such a way that search results link directly to your eBook page. Also, one of their blogs is all about marketing your eBooks. They offer tracking reports of your site’s traffic and even direct mail or telemarketing services.

Clark told me Dirxion was the first company to do electronic “flip books” like this, starting back when the four founders were working at AT&T, when they published the phone book on CD-ROM. In 1996 they left AT&T to form this company, and have since then grown to 85 employees and over 3000 eBooks annually. Clark agreed with me that ePublishing is still a growth industry, in spite of general economic trends. The founders are still active in this privately-held company, and they are still hiring.

So, how does a prospective eBook writer get their book published at Dirxion? Technically, it’s quite simple. Just provide camera-ready copy in PDF format, and Dirxion does the rest. They put the finished product, with visual navigation menu and flip page eBook, in a directory on their website, using a subdomain for your name with their domain name, or using your own chosen domain name (virtually hosted, still on their website). They handle all the coding and hosting, so there is no worry about bandwidth overruns on your own website, and your eBook is updated automatically whenever they revise their software. Or, as mentioned earlier, you can get your eBook on CD-ROM. All of this comes at a cost, of course, but I don’t have information on that yet, and naturally pricing depends on the number of pages, platform (Web or CD-ROM), extra services, and so on. Clark said he would get back to me with a rough estimate for the project I’m working on right now, but we are still in the planning stages so don’t even know how many pages we’ll be dealing with. I gave him a ballpark figure, and we will use that in our discussions over which publishing service to use.

eBook publishers need to make sure they retain their copyrights, regardless of who they use to “manufacture” their self-published eBooks, and it is not unreasonable to consider publishing in a number of different formats. When my company published Chris Andrews’ book, The Education of a CD-ROM Publisher: An Insider’s History of Electronic Publishing back in 1998, we did it in five different formats (hardback, paperback, CD-ROM, Website and Palm Pilot versions). Once the content is written and edited, it is frequently not too much extra effort to put it out in different ways for greater audience penetration, especially if you plan for that strategy ahead of time, and use appropriate publishing software that can export in various formats.

I’ll be talking with people from other companies in the epublishing industry, and will write about them here, so bookmark or subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up with the latest research and commentary. If you represent such a company, please feel free to contact me, too.

Posted in Format, Software, blogs, copyright, eBooks, ePublishing