Cory Doctorow has an ebook out - on the subject of ebooks at Book Glutton. This was the first time I have encountered the Book Glutton beta site. And it’s a very interesting concept.

Sign in - registration is free - and you have access to an online reader which has chat and annotation functions on each ebook read. Users - and groups of users can use these facilities to discuss the books they are reading - in fact consider this from an online reading group perspective.

Authors can upload their own books to allow these discussions and receive feedback on their work, and the Book Glutton site itself (launched in January 2008) holds over 1000 books at this time, with many groups of readers also.

Cory Doctorow’s Ebook, entitled Ebooks : Neither E, Nor Books, is currently sitting on the homepage books list. The ebook - based on a paper presented at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004, makes for interesting reading (even before the arrival of the Kindle and Sony e-readers).

Here are a couple of quotes -

For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I’ve had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license.

No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I’d call it: "Ebooks: You’re Soaking in Them." That’s because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.

Go to Book Glutton to read this dissertion on ebooks, and to join in with reading several other books online, and chatting over them.

This is an old entry quoted from March 2008 and Matt Buchanan on the Gizmodo blog, and one which is fascinating reading from a copyright perspective. Whereas I’ve always considered when paying for something that I retain some rights of ownership (and usage), my own ideas must be seen to be incorrect when comparing a real life printed book with it’s electronic counterpart.

If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the "first sale" doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?

In the fine print that you "agree" to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you’re not paying to own ‘em, in spite of the use of the term "buy." Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn’t take away your purchases. Still, it’s a license you can’t sell.

Further discussion can be found on the Gizmodo entry linked to below.

Link : Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up : Why Your Books are No Longer Yours (Gizmodo site, March 21, 2008)

This week in Ebooks -

1. Guardian Poll

The Guardian UK is still on it’s Ebook vs Real Book spiel (see Ebooks in the Media Today item) and has now posted a two-item poll for readers.

Link : Guardian Poll

2. Notethisdown’s Seth Godwin Ebooks

The Notethisdown blog has posted a small list with links to favourite Seth Godwin ebooks. I happen to have all of these myself, and even have a special category in my Ebook’s folders for Seth’s books so they are easily found. Practical information, and a great writing style. And most of these are free, and can be shared with friends.

Link : Notethisdown’s Post.

3. 20 Best Websites to Download Free Ebooks

The Hongkiat.com site has provided a great post listing twenty websites for downloading ebooks from, complete with screenshots of the sites also.

Link : 20 Best Websites…

4. Plastic Logic’s EReader Revealed

The latest buzz appears around the latest ereader, some suggesting as a Kindle-killer. Plastic Logic’s ereader is a larger flexible device to target business users, capable of showing Office applications, and PDFs. Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Note: Plastic Logic has offices in Cambridge UK, my own major city, and I first read about this particular reader some months ago in my local newspaper business section. On the photographs, I can personally see myself being quite comfortable using such a reader like a magazine (in fact, it can have PDF magazine editions on it) and tucking it back into my saddlebag when traveling or commuting. Also good for all those huge technical manuals I used to heft around as a software test manager.

I personally think they may be missing a target market here, concentrating on the business user. Most retail magazines now come in electronic formats, and with the bluetooth and wireless technology incorporated, could be provided as downloads and updates as often as the paper-version. When commuting or even traveling off on holiday, I tend to take large quantities of books, manuals, and magazines with me, and being able to hold them on the one flexible device - including perhaps all those travel brochures or travel guides, just seems immensely hopeful for the future in ebook / ereader technology. Hey, I could even get my latest House & Garden and BBC Focus (Science) magazine fixes at the airports as downloads, on my way out of the country. How kewl is that?

Note: the Plastic Logic ereader still is in demo, and still needs colour.

Link : TrustedReview’s Plastic Logic writeup.
Link : Plastic Logic website

Today has been an interesting day regarding the mention of Ebooks across media. Here’s a summary with my own brief comments under each -

The One Show, BBC, Thursday 4th September

Last night, the One Show, a magazine style program the BBC puts on at 7pm each week night, featured a debate between an eBook reader company manager and a woman who advocated only real books. The piece was brief, and set in a cafe. In my own opinion, the woman reader did little to recognise anything about the economical and ecological impact of book distributions, but the arguments put forth by Mr e-reader were limited also. Such was the nature of the lack of depth found in the One Show’s brief excepts. But at least I got to see an e-reader (the brand was never mentioned) in real life. They’re bigger than I was expecting.

No Link for this one, but the BBC website does re-run shows over the internet.

Lifehacker Asks : Do Ebooks, Legal or Not, Make You Buy Real Books?

Based on one author pulling her next book because illegal rough drafts showed up on bitTorrent sites (um, I’ve got to ask how they got there in the first place - who had a copy?) the Lifehacker site asks whether access to a digital copy of a book would make you go out and buy it in real form. There are some interesting comments on the post, well worth reading.

Link : http://lifehacker.com/5045885/do-ebooks-legal-or-not-make-you-buy-real-books

A Japanese Rants for More Ebooks

On a Japanese blog, Amlau pleads for more English-language ebooks to be published by publishers - even when they’ve gone out of print in real-life. Amlau can’t get enough english books where he lives. And it’s a good point about finding new markets for books which quickly go out of print locally.

Link: http://www.amyolau.com/2008/09/05/rant-for-ebooks/

Jeffrey Carver is Giving Away 2 of His SciFi Books in Electronic Form

Jeffrey A. Carver is giving away Volume 1 of The Chaos Chronicles, Neptune Crossing and Volume 2, Strange Attractors. The downloads are available in multiple formats also, including mobi, e-reader and PDF. On his blog (which I happen to read as an excellent writing blog), Jeffrey explains his new deal with his publishing company Tor.

Link : http://starrigger.blogspot.com/2008/09/ebooks-round-two-ding-strange.html

Stuff.tv say Only 13% Want Ebook Readers

I’m not sure what the 13% is of - or what group of people Stuff.tv are talking about or have surveyed (I’m going to presume it’s their own customer base), but they suggest that only 13% want an e-reader - whether now or ever. This post was as the result of the Sony reader arriving in Waterstones in the U.K. recently. 

My opinion - actually, if you consider how many books are published in the course of only one year, 13% sounds a good percentage in e-sales. But I’m probably wrong.

Link : http://stuff.tv/news/Only-13-per-cent-want-eBook-reader/10774/

The Guardian says They Still Haven’t Cracked Ebooks

With the arrival of the Sony e-reader, the Guardian newspaper online dishes the dirt, and basically isn’t impressed yet. The capsule review subsidiary blog also talks about this e-reader.

Link : http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/09/ebooks.html
Link : http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/09/capsule_review_sony_reader.html

I’ve heard a lot about this ebook around the web. For many high profile marketing gurus, this eBook about eBooks appears to be the recommended choice. However, as a starter in all of this, I obviously had to think around the price - Desperate Buyers Only sells for $77. That’s it. There’s no reduction, it’s not an ebook which you see peppered over the internet, and available for various prices or in those huge ebook packages which come with reseller rites either. It doesn’t even come with another free ebook thrown in, or some bonus info products or mailing list signups. You can only get Desperate Buyers Only from the one place, and at the one price. It comes with a 30 minute teleconsultation with the author only.

It’s not necessarily defined just towards eBooks either - DBO provides equally appropriate information towards a new Blogger looking at niche markets or other info products. It’s a How To Book for Ebooks, Info Products and Web Businesses. Still, the price seemed a bit daunting for me initially given the page quantity and my own budget. Could it be worth it in content, I wondered?

So, if I were to take this whole thing seriously, and keep away from where many thousands of others have fallen, I knew that I needed to invest in my own education and learning towards the entire ebook industry. So today I found that $77 and downloaded the ebook itself.

Written in 2006 by Alexis Dawes, Desperate Buyers Only contains over 90 pages of sense. There are other websites, blogs, reports, eBooks, mail lists and people saying the same thing, but this ebook is convincing, and rings true to the soul of any wannabe eBook writer like myself who realises just how saturated the internet is with eBooks out there, many on the same few topics. And many not making their writers the riches that the great Ebook Dream told them it would.

The book stopped me at Page 7 with the following -

How to Choose Topics That Attract Buyers Like Bee’s to Honey - (It has NOTHING to
do with “Doing What You Love”)

Online infopreneurs fail for 3 main reasons–

1) They focus on general topics.
2) They focus on so-called ‘hot’ niche topics.
3) They follow the all-time favorite, and frequently quoted, adage, “Do
what you love and the money will follow.

Do I agree whole-heartedly with what Alexis says? Hmm, I’m of the “Do What I Love” school. Being a wannabe writer first and foremost, I want to enjoy what I write about (and possibly live in the distant hope that somebody else might to?). Alexis also maintains an opportunistic slant on choosing topics. She favours writing about anything that has a desperation around it - and not sticking to the one or two niches where you might become an expert at. This initially may grate against those sensitive writers like myself.

But then, I happen to have lived virtually in a hobby community for many years, and in which I could easily write eBooks for, with a lot of love, knowledge and passion. But would I have any hope of selling them to that community? Nope, not on your life! My hobby is full of community boards, women and websites which not only expect to get their information free, but also has hundreds of volunteers across the world working on those boards and blogsites who are giving away that information for free, and who are doing it for no pay also. Now, that’s love, but not exactly a profitable topic for me to spend my time writing for, and expecting a buyer to somehow materialise from the niche when they can find out all they want for free.

My example above would have Alexis explaining this as the difference between an interest (or want) and a genuine and desperate need for information. And that’s a difference which will, well, make all the difference in finding the correct topic.

The premise of Desperate Buyers Only is therefore to give anyone who needs to locate a profitable topic for their eBooks the tools to do so. This is obviously centred around locating topics which are so sought after by desperate buyers out there willing to whip out their credit cards as soon as you give them the product. And those buyers know how to find it also. Alexis’ methodology goes roughly like this (for “audience”, you can also substitute “topic”)-

1. Choose an Audience - the section has 13 different types of audience bases listed (and most of them you have probably heard of all over the net).
2. Find the websites for your chosen audience - where do they hang out. DBO suggests methods of how to outsource this. Personally, I’d prefer to know what they’re talking about, so that I do…
3. Study the audience habits and terminology. Steps 2 and 3 are about the Who, What, When, Where and How of your topic.
4. Isolate the audience’s most pressing problems - what questions keep popping up for them.
5. Understand the psychology around those problems - what pains (niches) are they feeling
6. The Dealbreaker - methods to work out if potential buyers are searching for a solution to these problems.This is more than following standard traffic-driving marketing guff, it’s understanding how people go about searching for their own solutions.
7. Assess the competition - this sounds a bit obvious, but Alexis gives us methods to differentiate our product from that of any competitive product.

The Book itself is broken into sections, and I very much enjoyed the writing style within. Alexis writes creatively, and provides some interesting stories and personal examples which personifies the entire thing. She doesn’t pull punches however, including details which makes it obvious that this isn’t a get-rich-quick promise. The eBook acknowledges that choosing the right topic, researching this, and writing it is hard work, as is the marketing needed to allow your targeted audience to find your product. Alexis also gives details on how much marketing money she spends to earn the income she does get from her best-selling reports. And she packages all of this information into a succinct and reasonably small package (at 99 pages) with only four main sections.

The list above comes from the first section on choosing a topic. Other sections are listed in my own words below -

Choosing a Topic
Quick Content Creation - some simple methods for writing short quick reports
Taking on Competitors - an excellent section on how to create great sales letters
Websites - and generating traffic

The Sales letter / copywriting section in Desperate Buyers Only is good enough to have sold me the book in itself. As my own first venture into the thick of internet marketing and into a world with terminology I have little knowledge about, I had a few strange ideas (and abject dislikings) for those sales letter pages I constantly come across on the internet. Alexis’ Five Point Fish Hook, describing in no uncertain terms how to annihilate the competition, began to frighten me - until I saw the same details become an exciting sales letter - and one which would entice me personally (as your pathological reluctant viewer of such webpages).

Each section ends in some defined actions. The book itself would work well as a workbook for students, and gives copious details and methods in everything from the sales letter copywriting I spoke about earlier, to keyword searching, and affiliate marketing. Page 93 is a tabulated checklist which can be printed out when working through the selection of topics for a winning and successful info product. There are plenty of other websites and books out there dealing with the same areas, but having everything so detailed and packaged into common sense means this book is a winner for me.

I will re-read this ebook often, I am sure. Although the whole emphasis on making money from desperate buyers is a little off-putting to my own naive thinkings, I still understand that the information inside contains workable methods for my own writings and marketing. I have a fresh understanding from this eBook over how to find topics (even within my own passionate niches where I would ideally love to write for) and topics which will be profitable for me to spend time and energy within. The author has introduced me to methods which will allow me to get to know my potential customers, and build an expert reputation with them.

For my first Review on a product advising on eBooks, I am surprised to find that I’ve purchased a keeper and one I would definitely recommend to anyone wanting to write and publish eBooks. Desperate Buyers Only gives you the tools to find the topics within the something you love, or other desperate markets, and locate areas where buyers are willing to spend money on your problem-solvers for them.

The book should be read by beginners in the field before they go out and write that eBook (blog, or other information product) they always had in them, then come crashing down because they can’t make money out of it. But it has also received good reviews from experienced infopreneurs and internet marketers out there on the web.

This eBook should be on all of our reference library e-shelves, and is a genuine go-to Report for your collections. Without any doubt I will be referring to Desperate Buyers Only often. It won’t just gather pixel-dust on the hard-drive.

Recommended reading : Desperate Buyers Only (5 out of 5)

Technorati Tags: desperate buyers only ebook, go-to, infopreneur, internet marketing, reference, review of ebook