[LINK] Amazon Kindle e-Books for Australian Publishers

[Tom Worthington]

Australian publishers can now distribute e-Books on the Amazon.com 
Kindle electronic Book reader. I was able to register on Amazon's 
Digital Text Platform and produce a Kindle edition of my book "Green 
Technology Strategies": <http://bit.ly/60K78A>.

It took less than 24 hours for Amazon to approve the book for release: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/01/green-technology-strategies-on-amazon.html>.

There are some catches with this process:

* WEB FORMATTING: Kindle uses a HTML format which will confuse people 
used to producing books with PDF. I tried starting from PDF and from a 
word processing document, but the results were disappointing. I found 
the Moodle Book version of the content converted best: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/10/publishing-e-learning-material-for.html>.

* HYPERTEXT LINKS: I have hypertext links in the book, on the assumption 
that the reader has web access. In the USA, Amazon provide limited web 
browsing on the Kindle, but not internationally.

* AMAZON PRICES: I get only 35% of the recommended retail price of the 
book. This is more than LuLu charge. Amazon also require that I make the 
cover price no more than the book is available from other outlets, so I 
cannot set a higher price for the Kindle version of the book. But Amazon 
then set the international price of the book US$2 higher than the US 
price, to cover roaming charges. So Amazon version costs more than the 
LuLu version in Australia. I wonder if any of this would be legal under 
Australian price fixing laws.

* CHEQUES IN THE MAIL: Only cheque payments to the publisher are catered 
for to Australia, not electronic funds transfer. Also the payments seem 
to be recorded separately from Amazon's "associates" payments, so there 
would be two cheques to pay for. Google now pay by EFT in Australian 
dollars, making the process a lot cheaper and easier. This also avoids 
having a bank teller look at you suspiciously as you hand over the fake 
looking Amazon cheque: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/02/my-first-cheque-from-amazon.html>.

* ISBN: I entered the ISBN for the e-book, but it does not seem to be 
displayed by Amazon anywhere. In any case I got a bit confused and used 
the same ISBN as I had for the LuLu PDF edition (LuLu doesn't display 
the correct ISBN either), so I will need to fix all that: 
<http://www.lulu.com/product/download/green-technology-strategies/6250846>.

More on the process at: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/01/amazon-kindle-e-book-for-australian.html>.

ps: Next a large print edition: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/01/producing-large-print-edition-of-book.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274