Ebooks on Android Market

This bag now carries books.

The Android Market is expanding its reach... they have added ebooks to the offerings. Soon, we'll probably see music and movies, too on the Android Market. That's kind of cool for phones, but of course with the flood of Android tablets coming this year it will be really useful.

More places to sell ebooks probably means even more ebook sales. Ebooks have been on an amazing trajectory lately, after more than a decade of existence on the fringe of publishing. This year looks like a transformative year, when ebooks really become the most important aspect of publishing. The revolution is really occurring among authors, as they realize that self-publishing is more than just a viable option, it's usually the best option.

It's not all that easy, though. Ebooks still need to be edited, and most especially they need to be formatted. Ideally, you should make sure your ebook looks good on each platform. For novels, that's not as hard, since most ereading software and hardware does a good job of flowing text into the constraints of the device's screen. If you're dealing with charts, tables, illustrations, or a particular format (such as a rule book), it's quite a different thing entirely. Sure, you can take a file that you would ordinarily send to a printer and convert it to another format... but the result almost certainly won't be optimal. And it may be unreadable.

Then there's preparing a cover... creating blurbs... a web site... figuring out how to deal with various places you can upload your ebook to... marketing your ebook... There's a lot of things that an author will have to deal with as a self-publisher. Services are springing up to help authors with these things, but it's still a market in flux.

Android's announcement is good news, but it just makes it more urgent than ever that authors figure out self-publishing.