Leveraging eBook Products

by Brian Hack

Published on this site: September 11th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

Without a product or service that people want and are willing to pay for, there is no business. So, it all starts with the product. There are two kinds of products: physical and digital. Physical books have significant material production, storage, and shipping costs. On the other hand, ebook products are easy to store on a computer, easy to ship and deliver instantly over the internet, they have much higher profit margins, and you can automate most of the business.

However, my impression of the market today is that it's saturated with ebook products of marginal use value. This presents an enormous opportunity for content enrichment. It also changes the use value of marginal products to examples of educational and promotional material. As long as these relations are somehow communicated, the basis for business building will revert to quality and competition for enrichment.

Content is a quality that can be expressed as a principal of polarity where there are two poles or opposite aspects. The opposites are in fact two extremes of the same thing. For example, hot and cold are the same but opposite the further apart they get and are measured with a thermometer. In ebooks, quality of content can be informative or obscure and measured by use value tested by the question - can I use it or not?

My years of experience in the publishing industry introduced me to all kinds of content, books and bindings of all shapes and sizes. Now that I am publishing on the internet, the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" is probably more true today than ever before. In fact, ebook covers can in a word be described as enthralling and titles continue to raise the bar on headlines that sell.

All books require production of content that starts as a manuscript and ends up packaged as some kind of book or ebook. When I was a kid, I read comic books. When I was at school I read text books and novels. As a publisher I read novels of interest and technical journals in my field of work. In retrospect, I read a Tale of Two Cities in a comic book first, then again at school, which struck me as unusual because the condensed very low cost comic book gave me a head start comprehension of the original, published work. I mention this to point out that a digest version of a book or topic may be short on quantity, but the quality of content still has some use value regardless of its package.

Information products packaged as ebooks are all somewhere on the content or use value scale. What sets them apart is packaging and promotion. Books can over or under deliver content or packaging, but in the end, it comes down to whether or not it can be sold. The fact is that money is being made from ebooks positioned virtually anywhere on the use value scale.

Leveraging ebook products starts with streaming old titles to education, bonus, or promotion use while at the same time developing new enriched content. The main indicators of better content are chapters released for appraisal before sale and publication dating similar to printed books. If it's free then you've nothing to lose but your time. If you must pay, buyer beware.

If you're serious about the quality of your ebook content and packaging consider the eBook Income Generator Project designed to assist authors in the transition from manuscript to ebook like services publishers offer to authors of printed books. The workspace provides authors with immediate article copyright, content storage, workgroup access, and production tools. Authors can participate in book packaging options that range from do-it-yourself to full service graphic design and ebook output. Here you can take your project as far as you feel comfortable and know you can hand it off at any time for
professional completion.

The eBIG Project has just started and you can still get in free before the commercial launch, but expect some shortages at this early stage. Right now it's only available through subscription to the weekly Business Builder Report at www.h4h.biz

Brian Hack: currently authors and publishes H4H :: Residual Income Digest Express, http://www.h4h.biz a web site that analyzes internet business opportunity for the purpose of long term personal and business growth. Contact [email protected]