Yesterday we talked about some of the problems with the current generation of e-books. And by e-book we’re not talking about the types that require a proprietary hardware reader. We mean just digital files (usually PDF) that can be purchased online.
Travelfish is a company that specializes in producing downloadable guidebooks (eGuides) to travel spots in Southeast Asia. Each guide is available in PDF and costs around $2.95 – $3.95. For each eGuide book Travelfish tells the prospective buyer exactly how many pages and maps are included as well as other relevant information to help make your purchase decision.
And one of the things I like the best is that Travelfish provides screen snapshots of the interior layout of the eGuides.
That tells potential buyers that Travelfish isn’t trying to hide anything, isn’t attempting to rip someone off with a crappy e-book. Travelfish just put a little effort into making what appears to be a quality product.
I also like the low pricing of the Travelfish guides. I see a lot of e-books that charge the same as a printed hardcover volume. I think that a smaller page count along with a smaller price creates a better e-book product. Most books, even in print, don’t need to be 300 pages and an e-book certainly doesn’t need to be that long. Also, the low pricing should make the purchase an impulse buy for many people.
We think that Travelfish has a good model for the ways that e-books should be developed and marketed.
Its a shame that ebooks aren’t treated with better respect, but there are a lot of people out there on the internet who publish “get rich quick” books as ebooks, so you really don’t always know what you’re going to get.
An ebook that is super long will also download slower for some Internet connections. I use dial-up at home so can’t download a file that is bigger than 1 or 2 MBs. I can go to the local library and download files, but it isn’t always convenient to wait for a file to finish downloading, plus the libraries around here have imposed time limits for computer usage. It is best when a publication is available as smaller chunks. If I want to read it as a complete book, I’ll just print it all off or splice together the files after I’ve downloaded them all.
Thanks for your comment! That’s a good point about ebooks being available as a series of smaller files.
[...] this month we talked about Travelfish, a company specializing in producing low-cost guidebooks to Southeast Asia that can be downloaded [...]
I am currently reading “eBook Secrets Exposed” by Jim Edwards and David Garfinkel. Their suggestions are a bit different than this article (especially the pricing strategy).
[...] The price of each chapter varies but it seems to be around $2.50 or so. It reminds me of the TravelFish guides to southeast Asia that we wrote about last [...]
I always like when ebook authors put a little extra effort into making their ebook look “nice”. It seems to add a lot of value. It would be interesting to implement something like Amazon’s “Look Inside!” feature so potential buyers can actually look inside your ebook and view the quality. It seems that Travelfish has done exactly that!