http://www.TheCreativePenn.comPage 1
The following is a transcript of a free podcast interview with Joshua Tallent fromEbooksArchitects.com,interviewed by Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn
.Click here to access the free audio. The Creative Penn podcast has over 50 free audio interviewson writing, publishing options, internet marketing andpromotion for your book. It is aimed at authors, writers andpeople interested in books and publishing.You can see the fullbacklist of podcasts by clicking here. You can also Click here to subscribe on iTunes.
Hi everyone. This is Joanna Penn for the Creative Penn
podcast and today I‟m interviewing
Joshua Tallent.Joshua is the author of Kindle Formatting and is a specialist in
formatting books for the Kindle and other e-book platforms.
ebookarchitects.com,converting printbooks into high quality formatted e-books and taking all thepain away from us non techie authors. So welcome Joshua.JT: Thank you. Good to be here.JP:
Oh, thanks for coming on the show. So, maybe for those people who haven‟t
heard of you yet,
maybe you could tell us briefly a bit about yourself andabout your businesses.
JT:
Well, I‟m an e
-book formatter and developer
by trade. I‟ve been doing e
-booksfor about seven years. I started out working for a software company working ontheir proprietary format and then as the Kindle came out and e-books started totake off, I found that I could help people
–
especially independent authors whowere having problems trying to get their books into right format. So, I kind of jumped on that and started answering questions in the Kindle forums and it turnedinto a little side job. And I thought, oh this is great, I can do this on the side andstill work my day job and then about nine months later it had grown and I thought
so it‟s been smooth sailing and really great. The e
-book world is growing very
fast and it‟s great to just kind of sit on top of the wave and watch as everybody
figures out how to do e-books and how to get their e-books out there for people to
buy and it‟s a great place to be right now.
http://www.TheCreativePenn.comPage 2
JP: And I really started my blog
about a year ago as well and I‟ve been aware of you I
guess since then, but it seems like things have really moved on in that one year
since January 2009. And like I said, you‟ve been speaking everywhere and e
-books are everywhere so
can you maybe outline what has been changing in theworld of e-books in the last year or so.
JT:
Some of the biggest changes have been in the device market. You‟ve seen a lot of
devices kind of crop up in the last year. Before the Kindle came out in 2007, inNovember 2007, Sony already had its reader out and it was already
–
it hadalready been in the market for a while and nobody really knew what E Ink was orwhat the devices that they could use to read e-books were, but Amazon came outwith a device and all of a sudden the market just got inundated. And then in the
last year we‟ve seen a lot of new devices come out. There
are probably twenty orthirty E Ink devices out there. Some of them are only in certain parts of theworld, based for certain geographical areas but oth
er than that, I mean it‟s a prettywide open field. And we‟ve seen a lot of people come together
behind the EPUB
format which is the industry standard format and that‟s really good to see. Causethen someone buys a book, they don‟t have to worry too much
about being able toread it on just one device like you get with some proprietary formats like theKindle format. The restrictions are not quite as bad with that, with the EPUB
format so it‟s great. There
are a lot of good technologies happening.The iPad obviously is a really good thing to see and really interesting change inthe market and e-books are growing quickly. If you look at the numbers
–
youknow IDPF, the industry groups that does the EPUB format and manages theEPUB format, they release statistics every quarter about e-book sales and howthings are increasing. And every year, just year over year the last couple of years,
there‟s been increasing 150
,
200% and that‟s great for
authors
, it‟s great for publishers, it‟s great for anybody who wa
nts to sell their content and especiallyfor authors. I have to say,
the last year has been great for independent authors
who don’t have
necessarily the backing and all the money and all the thingsthat a big publishing company might have
. Being able to self publish yourbook and being able to, especially self publish your e-book and get it out there inthe hands of people, is much easier now than it was just two years ago.JP: No, absolutely and I guess
maybe I could ask your opinion on the whole U.S.versus international market because we only got the international Kindle justbefore Christmas and I believe Canada only got it this year. Is the rest of theworld catching up with the U.S.?
JT: Yeah, in some ways the rest of the world has been behind the U.S. in this and in
some ways it hasn‟t been. The Kindle really is the big dog in the e
-book world so
it‟s great to see it go international and I think that is a sign that e
-books are goingto spread. And you see a lot of
–
I mean I‟ve bee
n contacted by certain people in
http://www.TheCreativePenn.comPage 3
like Europe, Eastern Europe and South America who are looking at, you know,
they don‟t have e
-
books in their country. It‟s completely open market and they‟re
trying to get it on e-book retailing presence and trying to figure out how to do
conversions and things like that. And it‟s definitely growing very quickly in other
parts of the world but I think one of the things Amazon has going for it is kind of
a unified front and that‟s why Sony wasn‟t able to necessarily get the
tractioneven though the Sony reader was available internationally for a while before the
Kindle came out. It‟s that front that Amazon has, that fact that they really do
provide a lot
of the book buying online, they‟re
able to move international so
easily. It‟s great.Hopefully we will see it happen and I really do hope to see this, is we‟ll see
devices that will come up in certain areas like in Australia where you are, that arespecific to the market and the people in the area so that not everybody has to be
on the same kind of device. You don‟t have to be on the Kindle or the Sony but
you can have a device that really is geared towards the needs of the people in thatgeographical area and
that‟s
something that I think will happen in the next coupleof years.JP:
That‟s fantastic. So, I guess hopefully people
listening to this call are interestedin e-books in general but some people are still unconvinced. I regularly getemails from people saying,
why do you talk about e-books so much and do youhave any words I guess to say to one, authors and two readers as to whyshould they care about e-books.
JT: Well, e-books are in a lot of ways the way of the future.
I don‟t think print books
will ever go out of style or ever stop being used. I still like reading print book periodically myself and there are some things that just never are never going towork very well as an e-book. But especially for fiction, especially for content thatpeople want to be able to read easily,
they don‟t necessarily want to spend the
twenty five dollars for a hard back, an e-book is a really good way to get yourcontent, as an author to get your content into the hands of people who may nothave even found you otherwise.
If you‟re an independent
author and you‟re not able to get your book distributedinto the book stores, you‟re having trouble getting that print distribution that you
really would want, an e-book is a good way to meet your customer base in a way
that you wouldn‟t be doing in print
. There are a lot of opportunities to get yourbook into a variety of retailers online in e-
book formats and so it‟s a good way for
people to get to know you as an authors. Some au
thors actually will if they‟ve got
a couple
of books. They‟ll even make th
eir older books available for free or for acouple
of dollars so it‟s a really easy buy in for someone and those people get
hooked. They read your content,
„O
h wow this is a great story, I really like this
‟,
or
„this is a great –
they have a great writing
style, I like this author‟ and they‟ll
Search History:
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
p.
Ebooks: Your Questions Answered plus how to format your book for the Kindle
Transcript of podcast with Joshua Tallent from Ebookarchitects.com on developments in ebooks as well as how to format your book for the Kindle
1.4K
Reads
14
Readcasts
3
Embed Views
Recommended
More From This User
Notes
Load more
