by Joseph T. Sinclair

First, we had PDFs and then ebooks. But now we have some addi­tion­al dig­i­tal book for­mats that have gained trac­tion in the mar­ket­place. Let’s take a look at all to see how they compare.

PDF

This is an old Adobe for­mat orig­i­nal­ly designed to trans­form paper into a dig­i­tal for­mat. How­ev­er, Adobe updat­ed it long ago into a diverse media plat­form that enables you to inte­grate media into text. PDFs require an Acro­bat (PDF) read­er of which many are read­i­ly avail­able free for every dig­i­tal com­put­ing device. Hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple use an Acro­bat read­er. Since PDFs dupli­cate paper, print­ing com­pa­nies use PDFs to run their print­ing press­es. But the text does­n’t flow in PDFs mak­ing them less suit­able than oth­er for­mats for view­ing on mul­ti­ple devices of dif­fer­ent sizes. Nev­er­the­less, one can change the size of a PDF doc­u­ment in a PDF read­er to get a big­ger or small­er type size.

Ebook (EPUB)

In ebooks (the EPUB for­mat), the text flows. Lines of text wrap to grow larg­er or small­er just enough to fill the screen of any size device. Apple, Ama­zon, and oth­er online book­stores have adapt­ed the open EPUB for­mat into their own pro­pri­etary ver­sions of ebooks. Since EPUB is based on HTML, it is rea­son­ably easy to take an HTML doc­u­ment and con­vert it into any pro­pri­etary EPUB for­mat with­out a lot of extra work. EPUB also han­dles diverse media. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, not all online book­stores (i.e., Ama­zon) have enabled this diverse media capa­bil­i­ty. Thus, if you include diverse media, you can’t be sure it will be avail­able in every­one’s ebook. Each pro­pri­etary EPUB plat­form requires its own pro­pri­etary read­er or the Apple or Android read­er app. Thus, none is uni­ver­sal. Note that HTML5 and EPUB are like­ly to merge in the future.

Webbooks

Web­books are books that are web­sites. That is, they are web­sites that are books. Web­books are PWAs as defined below with one addi­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tic. Their con­tent for­mat is iden­ti­cal to a print­ed book. They con­tain only the pages you will find in a print­ed book, no more, no less. Thus the first web­page is the cov­er, the sec­ond the title page, the third the copy­right page, etc. And the last web­pages are the appen­dices, bib­li­og­ra­phy, and index (although you can sub­sti­tute a search func­tion for the index). The text flows, you can incor­po­rate diverse media, and the read­er or view­er is uni­ver­sal (any web brows­er). By the way, this is my def­i­n­i­tion, not an accept­ed indus­try definition.

Convenience  As a matter of convenience for readers, a webbook’s first webpage is the cover together with the Table of Contents.

Bookapps

A bookapp is mere­ly a book in an Apple (iOS) or Android app for­mat. Orig­i­nal­ly, it required a pro­gram­mer to pro­gram a bookapp from scratch, a very expen­sive task. Today using author­ing soft­ware or ser­vices, cre­at­ing a bookapp is some­thing any­one can do. The advan­tage of a bookapp is that the poten­tial mar­ket for smart­phone and tablet apps is much larg­er than the mar­ket for ebooks. Bookapps are only for Apple or Android devices.

Native Apps

Apps cre­at­ed with­out an HTML core are called native apps. Pro­gram­mers cre­ate native apps. Each is a cus­tom pro­gram. You can cre­ate any kind of app this way; and you can cre­ate a bookapp this way too. But it’a an expen­sive way to pub­lish. The pro­gram­ming cost is high.

PWAs

A pro­gres­sive web app (PWA) is a web­site that a user can eas­i­ly use on a smart­phone as well as oth­er com­put­ing devices. You sim­ply load a PWA into any web brows­er (includ­ing a smart­phone web brows­er) and use it. Anoth­er name for a PWA is a respon­sive web­site. That is, the web­site responds to a spe­cif­ic device and shows its con­tent dif­fer­ent­ly to accom­mo­date dif­fer­ent devices.

For instance, many Word­Press themes are now respon­sive. Thus, web­sites made with such respon­sive Word­Press themes can be con­sid­ered PWAs. There are also many PWA ser­vices that will take your con­tent and cre­ate a pro­pri­etary PWA. Such ser­vices tend to be expen­sive but may pro­vide a cer­tain amount of tweak­ing and tun­ing to make web­pages load faster in smart­phones. A web­book (above) is a PWA but with the spe­cif­ic for­mat of a tra­di­tion­al print­ed book. Because a PWA is a web­site, the text flows, you can include diverse media, and you read it with any web browser.

Hybrids

Hybrids are HTML cre­ations (web­sites) put into a pro­gram­ming wrap­per. The core of the app is HTML5. Due to its pro­grammed wrap­per, how­ev­er, the HTML prod­uct appears to be an app and can also use cer­tain device capa­bil­i­ties. There are author­ing soft­ware and ser­vices avail­able to con­vert your HTML project into such an app. Most tend to be expen­sive. A bookapp is a type of hybrid. What’s the dif­fer­ence between a bookapp and a more robust hybrid? With hybrid pro­gram­ming, your HTML project can take advan­tage of the many pro­gram­ming capa­bil­i­ties of smart­phones (e.g., GPS), some­thing that PDFs, ebooks, bookapps, web­books, and PWAs don’t do. How­ev­er, such capa­bil­i­ties are cur­rent­ly not like­ly to be of inter­est to most book publishers.

PODs

A print on demand (POD) book is a one-off copy of a print­ed book com­plete with a cov­er and bind­ing. More specif­i­cal­ly, a print­ing com­pa­ny uses a very expen­sive copy machine to make a POD auto­mat­i­cal­ly from a PDF. Typ­i­cal­ly, a POD dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny makes a POD only after a book­store orders it. You are unlike­ly to get many POD orders from offline book­stores, but online book­stores will put it into their online cat­a­logs (book databases).

Marketing

Before you ren­der your book into any for­mat, you need to decide how you will mar­ket it. For instance, Apple and Android (Google) may not allow you to sell your book as an app. But you can sell as an app if it con­tains enhance­ments above and beyond a book with just text (e.g., diverse media), or if it’s a hybrid with robust capa­bil­i­ty. If you want to sell your book as an ebook, you will need to con­vert into the pro­pri­etary EPUB for­mat for each place you send it (e.g., Ama­zon). Con­se­quent­ly, you need to have a clear under­stand­ing of what you can sell and where before you spend the time or mon­ey get your dig­i­tal book ready for dis­tri­b­u­tion and sales.

Cost

The cost of putting your book into one or more of these for­mats range from free to a mort­gage-the-house-to-pay-for-it price. Thus, it behooves you to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between the for­mats (plat­forms) and their mar­ket­ing impli­ca­tions. In addi­tion, you will need to review each soft­ware or ser­vice avail­able to care­ful­ly to deter­mine the scope of its util­i­ty to you and the fea­tures of the end prod­uct. The more you can do your­self, and poten­tial­ly you can do every­thing your­self, the less expense you will incur.