E-Books on the Rise

[Blaine Victor Morrow]

It's getting easier to make e-books now, thanks to easy-to-use tools. To make simple Word or PDF documents more attractive (e.g., add page-turning effects and zoom options), consider free services like  Issuu or Yudu. 

To incorporate multimedia, there's a nifty tool called Simple Booklet that lets you add notes, pictures, documents, music, presentations, videos, forms and widgets, and them share the e-book on Facebook, Twitter, Web sites, Blogs, or (of course) your course pages. Teachers should start with the educational version.

To create e-books for Kindle or iPad users, you might need a media converter that will convert your PDF, Word, etc. files to Mobi (Kindle) or ePub (iPad) formats. There's a free tool for that, too: 2EPub. Input formats: doc, docx, epub, fb2, html, lit, lrf, mobi, odt, pdb, pdf, prc, rtf, txt. Output formats: epub, fb2, lit, lrf, mobi. 

There's another free service called dotEPUB that allows you to convert any Web page into an e-book. 

In a Digital Book World survey conducted by Forrester Research, 5% of publishers believe their print sales will “decrease significantly” in 2012 versus 12% who thought the same about 2011 when asked in 2010. Meanwhile, "E-book revenue overall was up 117%. E-book revenue’s increase of about half-a-billion dollars just about matched decreases in the adult hardcover and adult paperback segments, the two largest at $1.3 billion and $1.2 billion, respectively."