by Brian Hack
Without a product or service that people want and are willing
to pay for, there is no business. So, it all starts with the
product. There are two kinds of products: physical and digital.
Physical books have significant material production, storage,
and shipping costs. On the other hand, ebook products are easy
to store on a computer, easy to ship and deliver instantly over
the internet, they have much higher profit margins, and you can
automate most of the business.
However, my impression of the market today is that it’s
saturated with ebook products of marginal use value. This
presents an enormous opportunity for content enrichment. It
also changes the use value of marginal products to examples of
educational and promotional material. As long as these
relations are somehow communicated, the basis for business
building will revert to quality and competition for enrichment.
Content is a quality that can be expressed as a principal of
polarity where there are two poles or opposite aspects. The
opposites are in fact two extremes of the same thing. For
example, hot and cold are the same but opposite the further
apart they get and are measured with a thermometer. In ebooks,
quality of content can be informative or obscure and measured
by use value tested by the question - can I use it or not?
My years of experience in the publishing industry introduced me
to all kinds of content, books and bindings of all shapes and
sizes. Now that I am publishing on the internet, the phrase
"don’t judge a book by its cover" is probably more true today
than ever before. In fact, ebook covers can in a word be
described as enthralling and titles continue to raise the bar
on headlines that sell.
All books require production of content that starts as a
manuscript and ends up packaged as some kind of book or ebook.
When I was a kid, I read comic books. When I was at school I
read text books and novels. As a publisher I read novels of
interest and technical journals in my field of work. In
retrospect, I read a Tale of Two Cities in a comic book first,
then again at school, which struck me as unusual because the
condensed very low cost comic book gave me a head start
comprehension of the original, published work. I mention this
to point out that a digest version of a book or topic may be
short on quantity, but the quality of content still has some
use value regardless of its package.
Information products packaged as ebooks are all somewhere on
the content or use value scale. What sets them apart is
packaging and promotion. Books can over or under deliver
content or packaging, but in the end, it comes down to whether
or not it can be sold. The fact is that money is being made
from ebooks positioned virtually anywhere on the use value
scale.
Leveraging ebook products starts with streaming old titles to
education, bonus, or promotion use while at the same time
developing new enriched content. The main indicators of better
content are chapters released for appraisal before sale and
publication dating similar to printed books. If it’s free then
you’ve nothing to lose but your time. If you must pay, buyer
beware.
If you’re serious about the quality of your ebook content and
packaging consider the eBook Income Generator Project designed
to assist authors in the transition from manuscript to ebook
like services publishers offer to authors of printed books. The
workspace provides authors with immediate article copyright,
content storage, workgroup access, and production tools.
Authors can participate in book packaging options that range
from do-it-yourself to full service graphic design and ebook
output. Here you can take your project as far as you feel
comfortable and know you can hand it off at any time for
professional completion.
The eBIG Project has just started and you can still get in free
before the commercial launch, but expect some shortages at this
early stage. Right now it’s only available through subscription
to the weekly Business Builder Report at www.h4h.biz.
About The Author: Brian Hack currently authors and publishes
H4H :: Residual Income Digest Express, http://www.h4h. biz a web
site that analyzes internet business opportunity for the purpose
of long term personal and business growth. Contact
author@h4h.biz
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