by Joseph T. Sinclair

Web tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides you with the means to pub­lish a book com­pe­tent­ly and attrac­tive­ly in one website.

• HTML and CSS pro­vide all the typo­graph­i­cal con­trol the book needs.
• CSS pro­vides con­trol over pag­i­na­tion for the print­ing of webpages.
• A wide vari­ety of type­faces (fonts) are avail­able online to use in web­pages (e.g., Google fonts).
• HTML can pro­vide a nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem to trav­el around the book.
• HTML enables the inclu­sion of col­or graphics.
• HTML5 makes it easy to embed audio and video into a webpage.
• JavaScript, a sim­ple pro­gram­ming lan­guage which almost every pro­gram­mer can use, enables embed­ding pro­grams, small or large, in a webpage.
• Togeth­er or sep­a­rate­ly HTML and JavaScript can enable interactivity.
• Embed­ded pro­gram­ming using advanced pro­gram­ming lan­guages is also pos­si­ble, albeit more com­pli­cat­ed for pro­gram­mers and sys­tem administrators.

These capa­bil­i­ties will enable you to cre­ate a book nice­ly type­set but also one that includes col­or graph­ics (e.g., charts, pho­tos), diverse media, embed­ded pro­gram­ming, and even com­plex interactivity.

Envi­sion a book con­sti­tut­ing a web­site where­in each chap­ter is a web­page, and there are no web­pages that are not part of the book. The book is the web­site, and the web­site is the book. Such a book is a web­book. A web­book con­tains 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. Users instant­ly rec­og­nize it as a book because it is in the tra­di­tion­al form of a book. It’s comfortable.

Useability Studies indicate that users motivated to read a webpage don’t mind scrolling. Thus, scrolling through one chapter is an acceptable user experience.

The web­book has a table of con­tents (with links for nav­i­ga­tion) and a search func­tion to act as an index. This idea of a web­book is easy to exe­cute in Word­Press (per­haps the eas­i­est web­site soft­ware to use) because of the way Word­Press is set up. Any­one can do it.

If the book is only part of a larg­er web­site, how­ev­er, it can cause con­fu­sion. A user might ask: Why is there more to the web­site than just the book? Why doesn’t the book also encom­pass the infor­ma­tion that’s in the web­site but not in the book?

So what’s the point? This is a great way to pub­lish a book if that’s your sole objec­tive. To read the book, users (read­ers) don’t have to go to a book­store to buy your book either online or off-line. All you have to do is mar­ket your web­book, and users have con­ve­nient access to your book.

Some ben­e­fits to you are:

• Read­ers can make com­ments, and you will learn about your typos.
• You can make cor­rec­tions in a time­ly manner.
• Some of your read­ers are like­ly to have more exper­tise than you regard­ing cer­tain infor­ma­tion in cer­tain chap­ters of your book, and they will com­ment on your mis­takes or inad­e­quate cov­er­age of cer­tain issues.
• You can make cor­rec­tions accordingly.
• You don’t have to play by the rules of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Alternative An alternative to a book website on the web is a book website (all the digital files) packaged into a ZIP file and send to users via email or made available to users via download. A user opens the ZIP file and uses the book website on their own computers without being connected to the internet. The biggest problem with this approach is giving users instructions on how to set up the website on their computers or phones. It’s not as easy or convenient as downloading an app.

All in all, a web­book is a great way to pub­lish a book if your sole objec­tive is to just pub­lish it. But that’s not the end of the sto­ry. How about mak­ing some mon­ey? Why not add adver­tis­ing? I believe this can work well for infor­ma­tion­al books, and I will leave it to oth­ers to fig­ure out how it might work for fic­tion books.

Affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is avail­able to every­one. At one time, web adver­tis­ing was gener­ic and an irri­tant to almost all users. Today adver­tis­ing is very focused and poten­tial­ly use­ful to users. Affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing enables authors and pub­lish­ers to mon­e­tize their web­sites See my post on adver­tis­ing in books for a greater overview of this inevitable practice.

Connection For downloaded webbooks, affiliate advertising does not work unless the users device is connected to the internet.

It’s appro­pri­ate here, how­ev­er, to con­sid­er some ideas on how you might use adver­tis­ing in your web­book. First, go to the Time Mag­a­zine web­site or the Forbes Mag­a­zine web­sites to see how their adver­tis­ing works (i.e., to see how not to do it). In my opin­ion, it’s egre­gious, over­whelm­ing, and con­fus­ing. Mag­a­zines with such great brands can get away with that, I guess. Adver­tis­ing in your web­book needs to be much more subtle.

Ban­ner ads are always pos­si­ble and may be appro­pri­ate for some ad place­ments if not over­done. Ban­ners include ver­ti­cal rec­tan­gles and squares in side­bars. For more pow­er­ful and less intru­sive mar­ket­ing, you can make your own ban­ner ads for affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing. You are not nec­es­sar­i­ly stuck using the ban­ner ads made by advertisers.

Side­bar adver­tis­ing goes in the sec­ond or third col­umn on the right or left of the main col­umn where you place the text for your book.

Icons adver­tis­ing (e.g., between para­graphs) can be less intru­sive than ban­ner ads and per­haps more accept­able as they take up less room. They con­sist of only an icon and a short caption.

Then there is text-block adver­tis­ing. Text-block adver­tis­ing is not a ban­ner nor an icon but sim­ply a block of words (like the old Google side­bar ads). Those words can be put between the para­graphs of your web­book text or in sidebars.

You can also have links in your text (words) to affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing. This has the poten­tial of being intru­sive unless used with restraint.

The idea is to have the web­site ads be as unob­tru­sive as pos­si­ble and make them go with the flow of the book. The adver­tis­ing must, of course, be very rel­e­vant to the infor­ma­tion being dis­cussed where the ad appears, and rel­e­vance is entire­ly pos­si­ble with affil­i­ate advertising.

Behind all adver­tis­ing styles, of course, is the link to the adver­tis­er’s web­site and to the adver­tis­ing infor­ma­tion the adver­tis­er presents to the user..

An infor­ma­tion­al book typ­i­cal­ly cov­ers a vari­ety of top­ics expressed in a vari­ety of chap­ters. Such infor­ma­tion can sup­port a vari­ety of affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing. A greater vari­ety of adver­tis­ing in your book equates with greater income. It all adds up to a steady income stream (an annu­ity) for your book. There is no book­store to take a sub­stan­tial part of the income.

Experts claim that as much as 40% of peo­ple read­ing books now read them in dig­i­tal form. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is hard to prove that fig­ure because it is tak­en from sta­tis­tics pub­lished by estab­lished pub­lish­ers and book­stores. And Ama­zon with about one-half of the US book sales and three-quar­ters of the ebook sales does not pro­vide com­plete sta­tis­tics. It appears that a sub­stan­tial por­tion of indie pub­lish­ing in dig­i­tal for­mats is invis­i­ble to the sta­tis­tics. Thus, it’s like­ly that dig­i­tal read­er­ship is much high­er than experts esti­mate. In any event, the breadth of the dig­i­tal book mar­ket is quite wide.

More impor­tant­ly, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly about 70% of the peo­ple read­ing books in dig­i­tal form use their smart­phone. That means a book web­site (web­book) has to be in an HTML for­mat that auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjusts itself to be eas­i­ly read on a smart­phone. For­tu­nate­ly, this is easy to enable. You have noth­ing more to do than sim­ply use a Word­Press theme that’s respon­sive (auto­mat­i­cal­ly adapts for smart­phone read­ing). Build­ing a cus­tom respon­sive web­site with­out Word­Press can be dif­fi­cult and expensive.

Con­se­quent­ly, you can kill all birds with one stone. Pub­lish a book using Word­Press nice­ly type­set with an attrac­tive type­face and respon­sive form Use affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing for rev­enue. Include col­or graph­ics, diverse media, inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, and embed­ded pro­gram­ming, if appropriate.

In many cas­es, your mar­ket­ing will be less com­pli­cat­ed. And best of all you keep more of the rev­enue than with oth­er pub­lish­ing schemes.

If you want to pur­sue this idea, check out the Jour­nal of Elec­tron­ic Pub­lish­ing, Vol­ume 18, Issue 1, Win­ter 2015 (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0018.1*?rgn=full+text) for an acad­mic approach to books in browsers.

Also take a look at the fol­low­ing web­book examples:

Pub­lish­ing by Voice

Pub­lish­ing by Webbook

Pub­lish­ing with Diverse Media

The Time­share Book

Hack­proof Email