A very good article on the subject. I agree with Bill 100%. BTW. Although Bill writes about the iPhone, these numbers apply to the iPod Touch as well.

Are you thinking of entering the Japanese market with your ebooks? Once again, PDF is your friend. Most of the recently introduced i-mode phones ship with Adobe Reader LE. You can find the technical specification on the NTT DoCoMo website.

Interesting discussion on the O’Reilly website. And a good laugh for those obsessed with fonts.

Yes, even those with a lot of practical experience with publishing ebooks agree that you cannot escape PDF. It’s become the digital equivalent of paper on all sorts of mobile devices. With Sony including PDF on the list of formats supported by their readers device, why fight PDF? Embrace it.

ZappTek sells ebooks for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Closed, proprietary, adding lots of friction to the movement of ideas. It’s a good model, if you want to sell content. Not the best one if you want to sell ideas.

I just published the first edition of “Publishing eBooks for the iPhone and iPod Touch, 1st ed.”, an introduction to publishing ebooks for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a short ebook that gives you the basic facts and numbers. And it’s a good example of how an ebook on an iPhone can look like. It’s only 1.99 USD.

David A. Wimsett has a good article about Amazon.com’s Kindle. I agree that it is a marvel of technology, not necessarily that of design, but I want to wait and see how Amazon.com will treat publishers who put their books on the Kindle in the future. Still, this is a very important delivery platform and I will be writing about it on this blog soon.

Apple has sold over 4 million iPhones. The number of iPod Touch devices sold is not known, but if we think of a number around 2 million we should not be far off the mark. That’s 6 million devices capable of downloading, displaying, and sharing ebooks in the PDF format. But that’s not all. Apple has announced its plans to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008. Add to that a very conservative estimate of 4 million iPod Touch devices and we are talking about a market of approximately 14 million devices. None of those devices are more than a year old. That’s a huge market waiting for content.

Always test your ebooks on the target devices. To make your life easier, make sure you get a device with the Bluetooth connectivity option and a computer that supports it. I use a MacBook, which has it built in, a lot of PC laptops have it too. But if you computer doesn’t have it, use a USB Bluetooth dongle. Make sure you buy one that comes with the drives for the operating system you are using and you’re set.

For phones/PDAs that do not come with Bluetooth, there is always infrared (IrDA) or a direct connection via a USB cable. Make sure you get the one with the matching plugs or use the one that came with the phone. You may have to install a piece of software that will let you communicate with the phone, but some phones can work in USB storage device mode, that does not require additional software.

If all of that fails, you can always use a memory card and move the card between your computer and the phone/PDA.

Personally, I prefer to use Bluetooth. No wires, no cards. Just remember to keep your phone/PDA on a charger if you do a lot of transfers as they will drain the battery.

If you aim for the widest possible distribution of your ebooks in PDF format, only use the standard PDF fonts. They are: Helvetica, Courier, Times, Symbol, Zapf Dingbats. You do not have to buy them, they come pre-installed on your computer. They are also pre-installed on every PDF reader.

This Cory’s talk is a few years old, but still so true. While giving your books away for free is something a lot of authors are not very comfortable with and Cory’s approach to publishing cannot be replicated on a mass scale, it is one of the best talks on what ebooks are and how they benefit both the reader and the writer. It’s a classic.