My process is very simple. They are way more technical than me. I start off by entering everything into Word and get the text nicely formatted, then I work from that to create the PDF, epub, and Kindle versions.
The ebooks I put out have definitely improved since I began the site though.
My abilities only run as far as HTML and CSS - although I did just start learning programming recently (so I have a fallback career in my fast approaching old age!)
Since you're getting more tech oriented, I'd like to propose that you consider rehosting this on a site like Netlify or Cloudflare. They host static sites for free. You could use something like algolia for search. Poof, hosting costs go away completely.
I've heard of Netlify and Cloudfare, but only vaguely know what they are. I think this is about the third time I've said this in these posts but - I will look into this too! Thank you for the suggestions :)
Regarding the PDFs - I will look into that. I think I always assumed if someone was reading on a smaller screen, an epub would suffice, but I shall see what I can do with the PDFs.
> I think I always assumed if someone was reading on a smaller screen, an epub would suffice
If it helps to understand why someone would stick to PDFs: I want to both preserve my ebooks over the long term (decades) and annotate them - comments, highlighting, etc. ePub's format is less stable for the long term, but most of all it lacks standardized annotation (afaict, after some detailed research). Also, if I annotate a book on my computer, I want the same copy on my small screen.
I have the old remarkable and use it without its cloud features. Even though, according to its documentation, it's supposed to be able to handle EPUBs, I have, for some reason, never gotten them to work.
I have also kind of "standardized" on PDF for the way I manage my own collection, because you can always make EPUBs into PDFs, but not the other way around.
I didn't even know I could set up PayPal or Stripe to work without getting an email. I will look into this.
For what it's worth, the emails I send are never automated, and I literally send a thank you email, but no more (unless people reply back to me that is)
I just wanted to say thank you for the love shown to the site in the past few hours. I've never had so many sales and donations in one day!
I was so scared to post a link here. Someone suggested I should a few weeks ago, but although I read this site quite a lot, I never thought to post my site. I am not really tech minded, and my site is quite simple.
But last night, I thought - ok, just do it. So I posted this, and went off to bed (in the UK). Woke up at 2.30am and saw many notifications for sales, and just ended up getting up.
So thank you. I love doing the site, and I hope you all find it useful :)
I appreciate all that you’re doing, but you really should include a license in your books. Since they’re all public domain, something like the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/ would suit. That makes the licensing situation completely clear to anyone who comes across the books.
However, I also noticed a complication. In your FAQ, you state “However, I DO take issue with people just taking all my ebooks, and offering them on their own site, as is, and not taking out my logo and website name first. Please don't do this. If you take out my logo and website name - fair enough - but if you don't, please bear in mind this is then copyright infringement.” That should also be made clear in each book.
Further, I’m not sure if you can really say that your website name is copyrighted. You can trademark a website name, but I’m pretty sure you can’t say it is copyrighted. I could be wrong — IANAL — & will happily stand correction.
In the footer of Standard Ebooks, it says: “Content produced by or for Standard Ebooks L3C is dedicated to the public domain via the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Content not produced by or for Standard Ebooks L3C but displayed on this website may be subject to copyright.” (https://standardebooks.org/) Perhaps that sort of contrast would be a guide (not necessarily about your website’s content, but as a guide to separating things out). While there, you might want to take a look at https://standardebooks.org/about/standard-ebooks-and-the-pub... as well.
Great project! I hope some of these points are helpful to you in your endeavors.
That part in my FAQ came out of frustration - I wrote it after a guy basically copied my entire site, including website name, domain, and logo - he did this three times (the last time he also served the downloads from my server). I honestly don't mind people sharing the books at all, but I'm not going to lie - that was annoying, especially when, at one point, his site was second in the results when you searched for mine.
With the copyright, I was more talking about the logo, but I can see why I didn't make that clear.
But in general, I absolutely do not care when people share the books.
So point taken - I'll rethink it and re-word it in the next couple of days. Thank you :)
The ebooks I put out have definitely improved since I began the site though.
My abilities only run as far as HTML and CSS - although I did just start learning programming recently (so I have a fallback career in my fast approaching old age!)