The Nashville Musician’s Survival Guide eBook, and eBooks in General

Today marks another milestone in my self-publishing book adventure, that being the arrival of “The Nashville Musician’s Survival Guide” epub and Kindle versions. I am pleased to announce that these digital formats are now available for purchase on my web-store for the low price of $9.99.

While I am still a big fan of old-fashioned paper books, and the original vision of my book was one which was printed on paper, I do see the practicality of eBooks and understand their growing popularity. In this hyper-digital world it comes as no surprise to me that printed books are starting to fall by the wayside, similarly to the demise of CDs, VCR tapes, and newspapers. But I believe there will always be a place for printed books, and therefore my book is available in both print AND electronic versions.

When the printed version of my book was complete I focused on the eBook conversion and hired a company that specializes in this work, eBook Partnership. During this process I learned a lot about the benefits and drawbacks of eBooks.

Here are a few benefits from the reader’s standpoint:

• A person can now carry hundreds of books in one small device.
• They are delivered almost instantaneously.
• They require no packing or shipping expense.
• They can show links, allowing easy access to related information and websites.
• Fonts can be resized to allow easier reading.

A few benefits from the self published author’s standpoint:

• The sale and transaction are instantaneous.
• They require no packing or shipping.
• They’re easier to sell internationally as shipping packages abroad is very expensive.
• They can be more affordable to the masses as they’re typically less expensive than printed books.
• They require essentially no storage space.

It all seems too good to be true, especially from an author’s standpoint. Well after a bit of research I learned that they are just a little too good to be true. Despite all these advantages there are some drawbacks:

• If your battery dies and you aren’t somewhere where you can plug it in your screwed.
• ebooks lack the look and feel of a traditional book – i.e. cover, pages, binding, etc.
• Unlike traditional books there is no market for used eBooks, so a reader can’t recoup some of their original investment.
• And perhaps the biggest drawback from an author’s standpoint is that eBooks lend themselves to piracy.

As we all know, when the music industry went digital, this was the start of the illegal filesharing era. Similarly to the MP3, the eBook is also far more prone to theft than its predecessor, the paper book. As the day on which I would release my own eBook drew near, I started looking into ways to protect my electronic book from piracy. I learned that there are protections that can be applied to my eBook to prevent this kind of theft but this would be expensive, and it would not be foolproof.

The truth is that even Kindle and ePub versions of books with the most advanced piracy protection (like the kind of protection applied to eBooks sold on websites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble) could be disabled by the savvy computer hacker. In other words, if somebody really wants to they can take any eBook, disable its copy protection, and pass it around the Internet as fast as a jar of moonshine will get passed around a Kentucky campfire.

Matt Horner, the eBook designer who worked on my project offered the following thoughts on the matter

“Overall, the value of DRM [Digital Rights Management/Copy Protection] is debatable and anyone who is set on copying your eBook would be able to strip the DRM from it within minutes by downloading free software from the Internet. My advice would be to price your eBook sensibly, accept that there may be some piracy, but assume that the majority of people are honest and would rather buy a reasonably priced eBook than download a pirated copy.”

So I have priced my eBook very reasonably – hence $9.99 (thousands of hours went into this project so I can’t simply offer it for free.) I hope that most musicians, the prime audience for this book, realize that this work has value, similarly to the way a songwriter or artist places value on their work.

So steal it if you must, but if you truly want to help preserve the noble endeavor that being an author or songwriter requires, follow this link and get your copy of “The Nashville Musician’s Survival Guide” today!