Top 10 Ways to Take Your Media Collections Digital

Top 10 Ways to Take Your Media Collections Digital

There's nothing quite like the feel of a new book, the smell of an old record, or the joy of heading to the comic book store every Wednesday. Sometimes, though, those physical collections can be a burden—like when you're starved for space or want something more portable for traveling. Here are 10 forms of media you can take into the digital age.

10. Scan Photos to Your PC

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You've probably already switched to a digital camera for most of the photos and video you take, but is any of it organized? And what about all your photos from the pre-digital days? If you have a flatbed scanner, take some time to scan those photos into your digital collection and touch them up. If you have the negatives, those can often produce better results, and this simple DIY negative scanner should work pretty well. Once you've got everything in digital, don't just leave it sitting around—come up with a good organization scheme, whether it's just in folders or using a photo management app like Picasa or Lyn.

9. Subscribe to Your Radio Shows as Podcasts

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Radio may be convenient, but it doesn't offer many other advantages. If you have a lot of radio shows you really like, chances are they're already available online as podcasts, sometimes with pretty extensive archives. And, with the right app and a little configuration, you can turn all your favorite shows into a custom radio station that you can stream from anywhere, on your own time. Check out our favorite apps for iOS and Android, and our tips on how to supercharge your podcasts for more.

8. Play Your Video Games, Old and New

If you play video games on a PC, you've probably already started using steam to buy and organize them all—after all, why would you want to buy a disc, especially when online stores have such great sales? But when it comes to those classic games from your past, you may still have a few old systems knocking around. Those are great, but if you want to play on-the-go, you can turn your smartphone or tablet into a portable retro game arcade, or create one for your house that combines all those systems into one. You can even create your own retro arcade table for some serious playing.

7. Turn Your Recipes and Cookbooks Into a Digital Database

Everyone's gotta eat, and cooking for yourself is the ultimate way to save money and eat great food. But once you start building up a good collection of recipes, it can become hard to sort through. Either you've got a shelf full of cookbooks or a box full of disorganized recipe cards you have to hand-write yourself. Luckily, all those cookbook recipes are probably online somewhere, and you can import them right into a digital recipe organization or meal planning tool. Then you can search for the recipes you want, plan your meals for the week, and even create a grocery list from the ingredients. You'll never go analog again.

6. Read Your Newspapers and Magazines Online

Some of you digital mavens may scoff at those of us who still read old school newspapers and magazines, but they're perfect ways to catch up on news or keep yourself entertained when you don't have time to dig through RSS feeds or crawl Twitter. However, paper news does have one downside: it takes up a lot of space and wastes a lot of paper, especially once you start building up a collection. Luckily, going digital is easy: just grab your favorite news and magazine apps on your phone, tablet, or rooted ereader. Apple's Newsstand and Android's Google Play have some pretty great collections, and you can also get a lot of cheap magazines from apps like Zinio. If you're looking for old issues, you can often find them via Google Books or other sources. And when you're done, those old newspapers make great odor removers. Photo by Hector Alejandro.

5. Immortalize Your Journals, Drawings, and Other Personal Creations

Chances are you have a few old keepsakes lying around, from journals you wrote when you were younger to drawings and other projects. You probably don't want to get rid of these, and you shouldn't—but if you don't have room to store them nearby or want to make them easier to access, you can scan them in just like you do photos. Going forward, you might consider taking some of those hobbies ditigal—for example, it's really easy to keep a private journal online or get started with digital drawing. It lacks some of the emotion of pen-to-paper, but you can also do a lot of other cool stuff with it.

4. Consolidate Your Massive Comic Book Collection

If you're tired of digging through long boxes just to read a few of your old comics, it might be time to take them digital. You can subscribe to your favorite comics from companies like Marvel and DC with apps like ComiXology, or use a CBR reader for old, indie, or other scanned issues. Check out the best comic book readers for the desktop, iOS, and Android for more, and start collecting.

3. Load Up Your Ereader with Books

Physical books still have their time and place for sure, but when you don't want to carry around a giant tome like Lord of the Rings, an ereader is the perfect option. Not only can you load up on ebooks for free or cheap, but a lot of ebook apps actually enhance your reading experience by helping you keep track of characters, look up words and locations, search through text, translate it, and more. Check out the five best ebook stores for more, and if you have some ebooks lying around already, you can consolidate them and remove their DRM with Calibre for a truly organized collection.

2. Rip Your DVDs, Blu-Rays, and VHS Tapes

If your shelves are buckling under the weight of your massive DVD and Blu-Ray collection, maybe it's time to go digital. Maybe you've already started with a service like Netflix, but when it comes to the movies you already bought, you have a lot of choices for downsizing that physical collection. Our favorite method, though is ripping those discs and crafting your own personal library of movies on a home theater PC or set-top box. You probably know how to rip a DVD, and ripping Blu-Rays is almost as easy, so what are you waiting for? Analog formats like VHS are more complicated, but with the right equipment, it can be done.

1. Organize and Upgrade Your Massive Music Library

Okay, so you probably knew this was coming—in fact, you've probably already gone digital with most of your music collection anyways. Ripping CDs is a breeze, and music stores like iTunes and Amazon make it so easy to buy music you've probably ditched CDs altogether. But if your library's a little overwhelmed, it may be time to go clean it up a bit—get rid of stuff you don't want, make sure your metadata is all correct, and so on. Try out a new music player or upgrade those old, low-bitrate songs. Streaming services like Spotify and Rdio can get you pretty far, but they probably won't replace your library 100%. And if you do still have some analog music lying around—like old records—you can digitize and clean those up for your library too, so you can listen to them anywhere.

Top 10 Ways to Take Your Media Collections Digital

Read Later" Apps Compared: Pocket vs. Instapaper vs. Readability

"Read Later" Apps Compared: Pocket vs. Instapaper vs. Readability

Chances are, you stumble upon a lot of articles during the day that look interesting, but that you don't have time to read right now. Lots of services have cropped up to solve this problem, and today we're looking at the most popular three and pitting them against one another: Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability. Here's how they stack up.

We've touched on this subject a few times before, and this article originally appeared back in March of 2012 (which is why some of the comments are outdated). However, with the years come new names, new features, and more. So, we've updated this comparison to include the latest versions of each app.

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Pocket (Formerly Read It Later)

Pocket was the first of these bookmark and read later services back when it was called Read It Later, and as such has an impressive spread of supported devices and apps. It's also come a long way in the looks department, and has some killer features that make it our favorite of the three.

Price: Free

Supported Devices: Pocket has official apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, and the web. There are also third party clients for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, WebOS, and others available.

Supported Apps: Pocket has, by a good margin, the most support among third party apps. If you want to save articles from Pulse, Flipboard, the Onion, TweetBot, the Alien Blue Reddit Client, and other apps, Pocket is the service to use. It also has browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and a bookmarklet that works in any browser. For everything else, it has an easy save-by-email function. You can view the full list of supported apps here.

Interface & Features: Pocket is probably the most feature-packed of the three clients. Apart from the features mentioned above, Pocket can also:

• Save embedded video in any article so you can watch them inline. No other read-it-later app does this (though you must unfortunately be online for this feature to work in Pocket).
• Send articles to other people via email, or—even better—straight to other Pocket users.
• Choose from two different fonts, multiple font sizes, and three different color palettes (black on white, white on black, and sepia).
• Choose from two views on the home screen: a tiled "card" view and a traditional list view.
• Tag articles for easier browsing

Who Should Use It: When in doubt, Pocket probably supports your device of choice and the apps you use. It has a solid feature set and a well put together interface, plus it's supported by nearly everyone that supports a bookmark and read later app. Currently, it's our favorite read later service.

Instapaper

Instapaper was long popular with the iOS crowd, but has since expanded to other platforms. Its always been praised for its design, but we think its biggest strength lies in its article discovery. Not only can you save articles you found on the web, but the ability to follow your friends on Instapaper is a great way to pick up a few more, plus the Editor's Picks help you find articles you wouldn't have otherwise read. It's mainly focused on the Mac and iOS side of things, but has a lot of third party support on other platforms too.

Price: $3.99 on iOS, $2.99 on Android. Instapaper also offers a $1/month subscription service that lets you search your entire archive of articles, which is handy.

Supported Devices: Instapaper officially only supports iOS, Android, and the Kindle. You can also export your articles in ePub format, for use on any ereader that supports it.

Supported Apps: Instapaper doesn't have quite as many supported apps as Pocket, and many of them are iOS and Mac apps (like Reeder, NetNewsWire, and Tweetbot), but the list is still impressive. You can also submit articles via a bookmarklet or by email. Check out Instapaper's list of supported apps for more information.

Interface & Features: Instapaper has a very pretty interface, and has grown to include a solid list of features. Apart from the above, Instapaper also lets you:

• Choose from 14 different fonts, multiple font sizes, paragraph spacing, and line spacing options as well as three color palletes. Instapaper has more choices for customizing the reader interface than any other app of its type.
• Follow other people on Instapaper and read articles they've "liked"
• Discover popular articles others are reading through Instapaper's "The Feature" section (which is a little wonky and includes a lot of duplicates, but is still a great way to find stuff to read)
• Choose from two views on the home screen: a tiled "card" view and a traditional list view.
• Scroll through articles by tilting your device back and forth.
• Define words you don't know using an offline dictionary.
• Organize articles in folders for easier browsing.
• Search your entire archive of articles (pro subscription only).

Who Should Use It: If you love choosing between a bunch of different fonts, like novel features like tilt scrolling, and have other friends using Instapaper, this app is for you. In our experience, it doesn't always work as well as other apps at stripping and presenting articles, but as far as design configurability goes, it's the most powerful of the three.

Readability

Readability has always been a big name in making web articles more readable, but it's way behind the times on the bookmark service and mobile apps. Still, while it may not be as mature and feature-filled as its cousins, its simplicity may win over people who just want to get reading.

Price: Free

Supported Devices: Readability supports iOS, Android, and Kindle devices, and it has extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, plus the usual bookmarklets and add-by-email features.

Supported Apps: Readability doesn't have a lot of app integration, though it does work with a few popular ones, like Pulse, Reeder, Flipboard, Tweetbot, Longofm, and iCab Mobile. Check out Readability's apps page for more info.

Interface & Features: Readability looks pretty similar to Instapaper, but with fewer options. We think it looks a little nicer and its gestures and animations really make its interface nice, but it isn't nearly as feature-filled as the other apps. With it, you can:

• Navigate the app with a number of handy gestures
• Tag articles for easier browsing
• See what other people are reading with the "Top Reads" list, which is an awesome way to find new articles
• Choose from two views on the home screen: a tiled "card" view and a traditional list view.
• Choose from five different fonts, five text sizes, five settings for column width, and two color palletes (light and dark).

Who Should Use It: Readability is probably the prettiest in our opinion, both in interface design, gestures, and animations, but it doesn't have a ton of features or support a lot of apps. If you just want something simple, Readability will work fine, but otherwise, we'd recommend skipping it in favor of Pocket or Instapaper.

Read Later" Apps Compared: Pocket vs. Instapaper vs. Readability

Best Websites for Downloading, Renting, and Purchasing Audiobooks

The Best Websites for Downloading, Renting, and Purchasing Audiobooks

We recently published a list of websites where you can download free eBooks, or purchase, borrow, or rent eBooks. However, if you would rather listen to your favorite books, here are some websites offering audiobooks you can download, rent, or purchase, some free, some not.

Free Audiobooks

There a lot of free audiobooks available on various sites, some in the public domain and some from independent authors.

LibriVox.org

LibriVox is a non-commercial, non-profit, and ad-free project that posts audiobooks recorded from books in the public domain, recorded by volunteers, and made available as MP3 downloads or podcasts. The goal of LibriVox is to make all books in the public domain available as free audiobooks on the web.

In addition to downloading audiobooks, you can also volunteer to be a reader. The only qualification is that you have an audible voice.

BooksShouldBeFree.com

Books Should Be Free provides audiobooks from the public domain available for free that you can listen to on your iPhone, Android, Kindle, or MP3 player. It’s similar to LibriVox and uses LibriVox and Gutenberg.org as sources for the free audiobooks. However, Books Should Be Free provides a more visually entertaining experience and easier way to browse through audiobooks, which are divided into many different genres for your browsing enjoyment.

NewFiction.com

If you like soap operas, NewFiction offers audiobooks in episode format, performed by multiple, trained, dramatic actors, called iSoaps. They’re considered modern-day radio dramas. Simply sign up and you’ll get a daily installment delivered to your computer, iPod, iPad, or smartphone. You can also listen to the episodes online or download them directly to your computer or portable device.

PodioBooks.com

PodioBooks.com is similar to NewFiction. They offer about 434 free audiobooks in episodes as podcasts, available in 30 categories. You can receive them as RSS feeds or download the episodes directly.

Librophile

Librophile offers thousands of free and pay audiobooks and free eBooks. You can subscribe to each free audiobook in iTunes as episodes or download the whole audiobook directly. There are also links allowing you to directly access the eBook versions of the audiobooks on the Project Gutenberg website. The free audiobooks are mostly obtained from the public domain from LibriVox and the pay audiobooks through the Audible affiliate program (see later in this article for more information about Audible). Children’s audiobooks are mostly sourced from Storynory (also see later in this article for more information). Free eBooks are available in multiple formats.

Move your mouse over each thumbnail on the main page to read a summary (it may only be a partial summary) of the audiobook or eBook.

AudioBooksForFree.com

AudioBooksForFree.com offers classic books recorded as audiobooks for download as MP3 files. There are many categories to help you find what you want, and you can even record and sell your own eBooks on their site, as long as you are the copyright owner.

Project Gutenberg – The Audio Books Project

The Audio Books Project by Project Gutenberg offers audiobooks created from the classic literature eBooks on their site. They have human-read audiobooks read by volunteers (through sites such as AudioBooksForFree.com and LibriVox), as well as computer-generated audiobooks.

They are working on ways to automatically create computer-generated eBooks on demand.

FreeClassicAudioBooks.com

FreeClassicAudioBooks.com offers free, downloadable, classic audiobooks in MP3 format and M4B format for iTunes and iPod. You can also support the site by buying collections of audiobooks, audio short stories, and audio language courses on DVD.

AudioBookTreasury.com

AudioBookTreasury.com offers an ever-growing collection of free audiobooks you can download as MP3 files. They’ve improved upon the free audiobooks by removing advertisements and cleaning up the audio files. You can also find recommendations on their site for the best current audiobooks available for purchase. There are even quizzes about classic books for you to take while waiting for downloads.

Ambling Audio Books

Ambling Audio Books offers thousands of free audiobooks, most of which come from LibriVox. They provide an easy-to-use interface for browsing and downloading the audiobooks. You can play sample clips, check narrator ratings, and read reviews posted by Ambling listeners. Ambling Audio Books has their own player available for Android phones and tablets, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows, Mac, or Linux. Their player was designed specifically for audiobooks and contains many useful features, such as bookmarks, file management, and the ability to control the player from Bluetooth headphones.

You can also add your own ratings and reviews for the benefit of other Ambling listeners, and even publish your own audiobook.

NOTE: Ambling Audio Books also offers audiobooks for purchase.

ThoughtAudio.com

ThoughtAudio offers a collection of classical audiobooks that you can listen to online or download in segments. Some of the audiobooks are available as written text in PDF format for download.

LearnOutLoud.com

LearnOutLoud.com offers over 5000 free audio and video titles from all over the web that can be downloaded in MP3 format (most audio titles) or streamed online (most video titles). These include free audiobooks, lectures, speeches, sermons, interviews, and more.

Lit2Go

Lit2Go is a website run by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology in the College of Education at the University of South Florida. They offer a free collections of stories and poems in MP3 format. These stories and poems are meant for use in classrooms, but anyone can download them. Each story or poem has an abstract, citation, playing time, and word count, and many items also have a related reading strategy for use in a classroom setting. Each item also has a PDF file you can download and use in the classroom for reading along or as supplemental reading material.

Open Culture

Open Culture has an article that contains links to 450 free audiobooks, mostly classics, and some non-fiction and poetry. Some titles are available in MP3 format, some in iTunes, and some in both. When a free eBook is available for the title, there is a link to their 325 free eBooks article containing the eBook link.

Free-Audio-Books.co.uk

Free-Audio-Books.co.uk is another site offering free audiobooks, mostly classic and old titles, organized into categories. You can choose to download them in MP3 format or listen to them online.

Storynory

Storynory is a website that offers children’s stories drawn from unusual stories from around the world and from fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson. They also offer original stories. Each audiobook comes with the full text of the book in English which can be translated into other languages. A new audio story is published every week.

Wowbrary

Wowbrary is a website that regularly informs you about your local public library’s newest books, movies, and music (if your library is covered by the site). Register for free on their site to choose your local library and receive updates about their offerings by email and/or RSS. You can also browse through the latest additions and put a hold on a title you want to check out.

Non-Free Audiobooks

If you want current bestsellers in audiobook form, there are several good websites for purchasing or renting them.

Audible

Audible is one of the most popular websites for purchasing audiobooks and they’ve partnered with Amazon. In addition to audiobooks, Audible also offers radio shows, podcasts, stand-up comedy, and speeches from well known people.

You can listen to audiobooks from Audible on a large selection of mobile phones, such as Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry, MP3 players, such as iPod, Creative ZEN, and SanDisk Sansa, and Windows and Mac computers. You can also use a Kindle Fire.

Audible offers subscription plans (two monthly and two annual) that allow you to “buy” audiobooks using credits and to save 30% off audiobooks purchased without credits. You can get one or two credits a month (monthly plans) or 12 or 24 credits all at once (yearly plans). With you subscription, you also get a free daily audio subscription to either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Simply Audiobooks

Simply Audiobooks offers three ways to get new releases, bestsellers, classics, and down-to-business titles in audiobooks, available in MP3 or M4B format.

One method is to join their Download Club, which is a subscription plan that gives you credits you can redeem for more than 9,000 audiobooks on their site. You pay a flat subscription rate and you can download most audiobooks for one credit each. A small number of titles require two credits to download.

You can also choose their Rental Program, which allows you to listen to as many audiobooks on CDs as you can each month. Add titles to your shelf, and when you finish one and return it, the next title on your shelf is shipped to you. You can choose rental plans that allow you to have from one to four books at a time for a flat monthly fee. Shipping is free both ways. Depending on how fast you go through audiobooks, you can pay a lot less per audiobook than the cost of buying it.

If you don’t want to commit to a monthly fee, you can purchase audiobooks on CD or to download instantly without signing up for the club or rental program. You can save 10% on all physical audiobooks.

NOTE: Not all books are available for all three options. For each audiobook listed in their catalog, they indicate whether it is available for Rent, through the Club, or to Buy.

AudioGO (BBC Audiobooks America)

AudioGO (formerly known as BBC Audiobooks America) offers complete and unabridged audiobooks, both single-voiced (one person reading the book) and full-cast dramatized (a cast of readers acting out the story), and radio dramas. They are the exclusive North American distributor for BBC Audiobooks. Audiobooks purchased on AudioGO are sent on CD or MP3 CD, as well as available for download.

NOTE: AudioGO is a good source for Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane Adventures audiobooks, for fans of those TV shows.

Audio Book Store

The Audio Book Store offers a large collection of audiobooks, available in downloadable, streaming, and CD formats.

Their service for downloading audiobooks is provided by Audible, mentioned earlier.

If you want audiobooks to be shipped to you on CD, you can choose their rental program, which is similar to the Rental Program at Simply Audiobooks.

The streaming service is a monthly plan that allows you unlimited access to the entire audiobook library and you can stream an unlimited number of audiobooks per month to your phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer. One advantage to the streaming service is that you can listen to your audiobooks across multiple devices. For example, you can start listening to a book on your phone, continue listening to it on your laptop, and then go back to listening to it on your phone again.

Just Audiobooks

Just Audiobooks offers over 100,000 bestselling audiobooks from the most popular authors, and is very similar to the Audio Book Store. Just Audiobooks has also partnered with Audible to provide their download service.

If you want to rent audiobooks on CD, choose their Audio Book CD Rental Service, which is provided by Simply Audiobooks. If you prefer to buy audiobooks on CD to have permanently, you can purchase audiobooks on CD.

The Great Courses

The Great Courses has found the top 100 teaching professors in the country from Ivy League universities, Stanford, Georgetown, and other leading colleges and universities, and worked with them to create over 390 great courses you can purchase in video format on DVD or audio format on CD, download video or audio, or stream to your computer or mobile device.

All of these resources for audiobooks should provide you with many hours of entertainment and enlightenment.

The Best Websites for Downloading, Renting, and Purchasing Audiobooks - How-To Geek

Self-Publishing Your Book via the Web

The Joys and Hazards of Self-Publishing on the Web

By ALAN FINDER

Not long ago, an aspiring book writer rejected by traditional publishing houses had only one alternative: vanity publishing. For $5,000 or $10,000, or sometimes much more, he could have his manuscript edited and published, provided that he agreed to buy many copies himself, often a few thousand or more. They typically ended up in the garage.

Digital technology has changed all that. A writer turned down by traditional publishers — or even avoiding them — now has a range of options. Among them are self-publishing a manuscript as an e-book; self-publishing through myriad companies that print on demand, in which a paperback or hardcover book is printed each time it is purchased; and buying an array of services, from editing and design to marketing and publicity, from what are known as assisted self-publishing companies.

“It’s the Wild West in a lot of ways — people who are innovators can do remarkable things,” said Mark Levine, whose own self-published book, “The Fine Print of Self-Publishing,” is now in its fourth edition.

Digital publishing and print on demand have significantly reduced the cost of producing a book. The phenomenal growth of e-readers and tablets has vastly expanded the market for e-books, which can be self-published at little or no cost. Writers who self-publish are more likely to be able to control the rights to their books, set their books’ sale price and keep a larger proportion of the sales.

But one thing has not changed: most self-published books sell fewer than 100 or 150 copies, many authors and self-publishing company executives say. There are breakout successes, to be sure, and some writers can make money simply by selling their e-books at low prices. Some self-published books attract so much attention that a traditional publishing house eventually picks them up. (Perhaps you’ve heard of the novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which began its life as a self-published work?)

Still, a huge majority of self-published books “don’t sell a lot of copies,” said Mark Coker, the founder and chief executive of Smashwords, a no-frills operation that concentrates on self-published e-books. “We make it clear to our authors.”

Some people have no problem with that; they want only to print 50 or 100 copies of a memoir or a family history at a relatively low cost. But others continue to dream big.

There are two basic kinds of self-publishing companies, both Web-based:

ASSISTED SELF-PUBLISHING These companies focus primarily on producing hardcover and paperback books. They offer many services, separately and in packages, including editing, copy editing, proofing, marketing, public relations, access to social media and even strategies for drawing search engines to a book.

With the rise of e-books, virtually all of these also will publish a manuscript digitally, and many have their own online bookstores.

At Lulu, for example, you pay nothing upfront. Each time a print book is sold, you receive 80 percent of the proceeds, beyond the cost of manufacturing the book. For $450, Lulu offers an editing package for books longer than 7,500 words (which is most books). Lulu will have a designer create a book cover for $130, and it provides groups of services like editing, design and formatting, starting at $729 and going as high as $4,949.

At CreateSpace, a division of Amazon, the process for producing a print book is similar. You go to the Web site, sign up for an account and follow the steps to prepare a print book for publication. If you sell your book through Amazon, you receive 60 percent of the proceeds, minus the cost of printing. Optional services include copy editing, which starts at $120, and converting a print file to an e-book for Kindle, $69.

Half a dozen packages, the most expensive of which costs $4,853, provide services like comprehensive editing, cover and interior design, promotion and publicity assistance and a video book trailer.

Relatively similar services can be found at many other Web sites, including Aventine Press; Self Publishing Inc.; Hillcrest Media; and iUniverse, Xlibris and AuthorHouse, which are among the imprints owned by Author Solutions, a company purchased last month by Penguin, a traditional publishing house, for $116 million.

Be sure to carefully compare prices since they can vary considerably, especially on printing and sharing in the sales.

E-BOOKS AND NO-FRILLS WEB SITES Smashwords is one of the low-cost Web sites that publish only e-books. As with similar sites, you can publish a digital book free, and then put it on sale at many online retailers, including Smashwords’s store, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony.

Proceeds are split this way: You get 60 percent of the book’s sales price, Smashwords receives 10 percent and the retailer gets 30 percent. (If you sell through Smashwords instead of a big retailer, you retain 85 percent.) Mr. Coker, the site’s founder, said it did not offer any services because he wanted to encourage do-it-yourself e-book publishing. Instead, the Web site provides lists of inexpensive independent contractors who can help with formatting an e-book or designing a cover.

Scribd got its start as a sharing site, where people distribute writing of all kinds free. The site now has an online store, where you can follow instructions to publish a manuscript as an e-book; when it is purchased at Scribd’s store, you get 80 percent of the proceeds.

Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo also provide platforms for publishing an e-book and selling it at their stores. The details vary. Apple, for instance, gives you 70 percent of the proceeds for sales at its iBookstore; Barnes & Noble provides 65 percent of the list price of e-books priced from $2.99 to $9.99 that are sold on its online store. Although Google does not have a self-publishing platform, its store is open to self-publishers, with 52 percent of the proceeds going to the writers.

You can usually, though not always, put an e-book up for sale at many online stores, not just at the one owned by the company through which you published the e-book.

Some self-publishers strongly recommend spending money on help with formatting both print and e-books; this process can be complicated, time-consuming and frustrating to do yourself, though by no means impossible if you are patient and technologically adept.

They also say you need to study carefully the details of each company’s contracts; some charge very high markups for printing hardcover and paperback books, offer a lower share of the sales or make it difficult and expensive to leave a self-publishing company if you become dissatisfied.

“It really is buyer beware out there,” said Ron Pramschufer, president of Self Publishing Inc. “Don’t get into the publishing business without learning something about publishing.”

A number of blogs and books on self-publishing can help you understand the business’s many complexities and distinguish transparent, well-run companies from those that benefit themselves far more than their authors.

The single toughest part of self-publishing is getting attention for your book. Nearly 350,000 new print titles were published in 2011, and 150,000 to 200,000 of them were produced by self-publishing companies, said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research, which conducts an annual survey of new books.

The quality of self-published books varies widely, “and people don’t know what’s good and what’s not,” said David Carnoy, an executive editor of CNET.com, which provides news and reviews of new technology.

Mr. Carnoy self-published a novel, “Knife Music,” in 2008. It sold enough copies that a traditional publisher eventually bought it. Among his suggestions for selling your book: devise a creative marketing campaign, try one new tactic a day, and study the strategies used by successful self-publishers and imitate them.

“The biggest thing you have against you in trying to sell your book is that people don’t know about it,” he said.

Ins and Outs of Publishing Your Book via the Web - NYTimes.com

Self-publish books for Kindle and other platforms using BookType

How to self-publish books for Kindle and other platforms using BookType

by Sarah Watts

BookType is being touted as the WordPress of books and e-books as it lets you self publish your books for Kindle, other digital formats, and for that matter, even for print publications like Lulu.com (it lets you print books on demand).

Ever since the launch of digital book formats such as Kindle there have been many self published books and some writers have actually experienced massive success in the arena of self publishing.

Self publishing, as mentioned in this Read Write Web blog post, is a trend that is fast catching up. No longer you have to work with big publishing houses and elusive agents in order to get your book published. Although there are many online collaboration tools (even GoogleDocs) with BookType you can collaborate with other authors specifically for creating books.

BookType is a social platform with Twitter-like capabilities that allow you to exchange ideas and have real time conversations with different collaborators. It is ideal for non-fiction, research-based, data intensive books rather than fictions and stories, although it isn’t necessary that you cannot dabble with fiction using BookType. Along with tracking changes it also allows you to import content, grab data snippets, images and other bits of information and put them in your book.

It is quite easy to create a new book in BookType or work on an existing book. It uses a GUI interface to make working on your book as easy as possible, although right now the interface doesn’t look as fancy as you might find in many desktop as well as web-based applications such as word processors. The moment you have logged in you are given an option of either creating a new book or opening an existing book for editing.

As you can see in the above image there are different tabs you can use to manage various aspects of the book you are creating. Eventually when the book is created, you can publish it using your preferred format, whether you want to promote it on Kindle or somewhere else.

Every version of the book is saved in the history section so you can jump to any version you feel like and start working from the.

BookType is available in most of the platforms using computers, smart phones and tablet computers. It uses a web interface so if you want to download the open source software you will need to run it on a server.

Self publishing is an emerging market and there is going to be a horde of open source as well as expensive commercial tools to enable writers all over the world publish for themselves rather than for agents and publishers.

Read the review of BookType on the Forbes website.

Here is an introductory video on BookType

Booktype, the open source publishing platform. from Sourcefabric on Vimeo.

How to self-publish books for Kindle and other platforms using BookType