Are you among those who are confused by the concept of an e-book?

If you look around on my site, you’ll see that my novel Babe in the Woods and my non-fiction exploration Chasing Smallwood are both available as e-books. But what’s an e-book?

Here’s how I think of them. An e-book is something that you can download and read on screen, yes. But how many people want to do that? I like to think of them as an easy way to download a book and print it out myself. The cost of ink and toner isn’t much, assuming that the book has been well laid out, and for long material I vastly prefer to read printed material rather than phosphors on screens.

Of course, more than either, I prefer buying finished books, with durable covers. But as one-man-band publisher, I don’t see how I can afford to print books unless I know that I have enough orders to pay for the printing. (Yes, I know that isn’t how conventional publishers do it. Don’t I know first hand! But I just can’t do it that way; my material is for too specialized an audience.)

So, my intention is to put my material into shape, offer it as an e-book, and print it if enough people express interest in it. That way, I can move on from project to project (for, time is pressing, if you haven’t noticed) without waiting for any one book to begin making money.

With all that in mind, I am formatting the e-books so that they print two book-sized pages to a sheet of paper. This means you have a readable copy and you have wasted no paper printing manuscript with wide margins and inconveniently wide copy blocks.

This may be more than you wanted to know about e-books and my plans, but there you are.