eBOOKS

For some years we have been wrestling with the problem of e-books. Some people have been demanding them quite vociferously, and insinuating that we "can't be bothered" to produce them. This is just not true. The sad fact is that the format is just not suitable for most of our publications. Andrew May is currently working on transferring the books in our back catalogue that are mainly text, or which have very few illustrations, into e-books, and he is cracking on with them at a rate of knots.

Many of our books, however, have complex typesetting with footnotes, endnotes and references, as well as having a large number of illustrations. The technology to make e-books has moved on greatly over the past few years, and I am happy to say that by utilising Kindle software aimed at producing comic books and kid's books we can now produce static versions of our more complex titles.

However, let me warn you in advance. They do NOT have clickable links, or searchable text, but we hope to offset this by offering the books at a significantly lower price than the printed version. The font face and size are also not changeable except by expanding the page as a whole. When the technology moves on we shall move on with it. And in the meantime I still consider the hard copy titles to be the definitive editions.

At the moment we are issuing our e-books purely via Amazon's Kindle platform, because - as we understand it - there are free apps which one can download in order to read Kindle e-books on all other formats. However, we would welcome your feedback on the subject. If you buy our e-books please give us feedback. It helps us to improve what we do...

Jon Downes,
January 2015