Will My 686 Meg Book Make A Good Ebook? No!

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I’m a professional American writer. My travel ebook has 330 color photos and is 686 megs so I must use a file sharing site to upload it. Is this a problem? I am planning a series of these travel ebooks.

This is Richard. I manage the ebooks at BookLocker.com.

Ebooks of that size aren’t economically viable for three major reasons:

1.) Amazon charges a download fee based on the size of the final ebook file. This download fee is deducted before any commissions are paid to the publisher or author. That fee ranges from 15 to 30 cents per meg, depending where in the world the customer is located. Normally ebooks are, at most, 1 meg in size.

Your book would cost $102 to $206 just in Amazon download fees to deliver a single copy of the book to a single Kindle user. Of course, the price of your ebook would have to be higher than that and nobody will pay that much for a travel ebook.

2.) Even with an iPad, which would be considered the “Cadillac” of ebook reading devices, the internal memory would have a hard time holding many ebooks of that size. With a basic Kindle, customers could only store, at best, 2 ebooks of that size. No one is going to want all their device’s memory to be taken up by just a few books.

3.) In cases where the customer must download the file to store it on their device, the download times would be exorbitant.

Because of all this Amazon doesn’t even accept ebooks larger than 50 MB.

Not all books are good candidates for ebook publication. This is particularly true of books with numerous graphics and large files size.

Have a question for Angela or Richard? Contact them at: angela@writersweekly.com
http://writersweekly.com/ask-the-expert/will-my-686-meg-book-make-a-good-ebook-no
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