LEGAL AND COPYRIGHT PROTECTING CONSIDERATIONS FOR eBOOK WRITERS

When you sit down and write a book that you want to have published as an eBook (either self-published or via one or other online eBook publisher) there are a number of things you need to consider to avoid loss of income and other problems arising from lack of adequate copyright protection for your book.

There are of course other more or less legal matters you need to consider, but in this post I will restrict myself to copyright, and deal with the others in later posts.

The reasons that you should seriously consider copyrighting your book is that it has all too often occurred that books uploaded to less than reputable online publishers have suddenly appeared as work by someone else (normally someone who works on that site), or if you have posted it as a downloadable eBook on your own website and if  you haven't copyrighted your book before uploading it, it suddenly appears on the web as the work of another person, and you don't really have a leg to stand on, and all your work was for nothing.

Also sadly not unheard of is for people to download your book and then simply republish it as their own work

You could of course protect your work by locking it with a password or some similar bit of technical trickery, but this in no way stops someone simply retyping your book and going ahead and publishing it as his own work.

So, the best form of protection is to copyright it, you can then at least always prove that the book in question was in fact written by you.  This enables you to take legal action against anyone who in any way infringes your copyright on your work.  Still not fun, and can be very tedious, and of course contributes handsomely to your lawyer's income, but worth doing....  It is a jungle out there Folks!

This is a rather tricky issue as copyright laws vary from country to country, but there is a simple way to protect yourself that apparently works most times.  This is to submit your book to the copyright authorities in your country, and have it properly registered before you either post it on your own website, or submit it to an online publisher.

It is then of course up to you to be vigilant and do your best to discover any possible copyright infringements, not easy I know - the internet is huge, but you will need to do this, especially if your book seems to be popular!

Obviously it is beyond the scope of this blog to give you contact details of all the World's copyright offices (should you live in Angola, where on earth do you find such a thing?)  But in general it should be easy enough to find your nearest copyright office and do the necessary, and by and large it isn't too expensive either.

There are quite a lot of specialist websites that give useful advice about how to go about all of this, so I would recommend that you spend some time checking them out, especially if you can find ones that know the law in your particular country.

Here is a link to one such, in this case, American.  CLICK HERE

Good luck!

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If you have had any experience of copyright infringement on your work, I would appreciate it very much if you would let us know about it, and what - if any - action you took to deal with it, and whether or not you were successful.  Also, if you can recommend any particular websites that gave you real and useful advice on this problem.

Also of interest to writers - how on earth did you discover this infringement?

FORUMS FOR WRITERS OF eBOOKS TO MEET AND TALK

I thought it would be useful to have a hunt around the net to see what forums might be out there for writers of eBooks to meet and discuss things related to online publishing and allied matters.

So, full of hope off  I went onto Google to see what I could find.....................

What I found were no end of sites that were primarily set up to sell particular services (editing and marketing your books) or specific software that was designed to help you get your books into suitable form to be uploaded to eBook sites, but remarkably few forums where you could meet other authors and discuss the specific problems of this form of publishing.  Also, to add to my unhappiness, most of the forums I did find that sounded interesting were more or less moribund and the last posts being dated 2006 or even earlier!

To say I am surprised at this lack, would be to put it mildly, as there are lively forums out there for just about any human activity you could imagine!  Anyone interested in a  forum for ant breeding?

I shall shortly be moving this Blog to a Word Press version, (to be called eBookanoid) and shall definitely include a forum in it, as there is obviously room for a lively forum for us all to meet and discuss matters of mutual interest.

However, I did manage to find a couple that seemed lively and relevant and not too burdened with advertisements, and I shall put links to these at the end of this post.

Most of the more or less reasonable ones I came across seemed to be arranged more in the form of comments with longish threads rather than the normal forum format of listing the posts by title and subject, with all the replies attached so you can simply open a thread and follow it.  Clumsy, but manageable, I suppose.

Should you be hunting for technical forums, all about software for online publishing or the legal side of it all, that you will find OK.

Obviously writing an eBook is exactly the same as writing any other book, it only changes when you set about making an eBook out of it, so I suppose the lack of eBook writing specific forums is not totally unexpected and obviously there are oodles of forums for "ordinary" writers to meet and talk - the better ones of  these I shall shortly be looking at and reporting back on for your interest.

So, sadly I have to report that my hunt was pretty fruitless.

Anyhow, here are links to a few that did seem more or less likely to interest and be of help to you good folk.

LINKS:

Techarena:

eBook Snips:

eBook Friends:

Teleread:

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Obviously, if any of you know of a good forum that is specifically set up for eBook writers, do let us know about it, or even send me a review of it for me to post here (of course, as always, I shall credit you with writing it).

PUBLISH YOUR MASTERPIECE ONLINE: SUNDRY PONDERINGS ON THIS TOPIC

One of the joys and possibilities of the internet is to publish your own books online.  Currently there are a multitude of sites where you can upload your masterpieces and either allow people to download them for free, or even earn money with them. Or you could start your own Blog and publish your books there.

But, first you need to write the book!

The simplest way to do this is to sit down and hammer away at the keys in a program such as Word and work on it until it is ready to be published.

In this post I shall simply give an oversight of the things you will need to consider if you wish to publish your own  book on line, and not go into too much technical detail, that comes later.

Having said that, a certain amount of technical stuff has to be looked at, so now begins the technical fun.

Documents saved in programs such as Word can't be placed on the web, except as down-loadable files, and simply wont work on most eReaders, so you will have to convert your book to one or more file formats that are supported by eReaders.

You could simply convert your book to an HTML, XHTML or TXT format, and post them as ZIP files (see below for links to ways of doing this).  These will be internet friendly, and potential readers can convert them (using programs such as Calibre) to whichever format their particular eReader uses.  But a more reader friendly thing to do is to place your book online in a number of formats that are used by eReaders, thus saving your potential readers the hassle of converting your book themselves.

This is especially important if you are planning to place your book on your own site or if the file is enormous, with many illustrations for example.

Many of the sites that allow you to upload your book will convert your book to a suitable eReader format for you of course, but it is useful to know how to convert your book from a .DOC format to .ePUB, for example, if for no other reason than to be able to check how it looks on an eReader before launching it on the world.

For the more technical of you, a good place to find a step by step account of how to go about this is the site run by Jet Saber (Obviously a Star Wars fan!) in which he discusses various ways of going about this (click here to visit his site).

There are also sites out there who will convert your HTML files to ePUB and check them for you, see below for links to such places.

The world of online publishing is complex, as you need to consider all manner of things, such as protecting your copyright, locking your book so the text can't be altered, how to go about marketing your book, should you give it a pretty cover, place images in the body of the text and so on, all considerations that you will need to think about carefully.

I shall be writing posts about all these matters, one by one as I go along, since they are important things to know about and you will need to make the correct decisions on all of them in order to make your published book look and feel the way you want it to. So keep coming back, or use the Atom feed below to see these posts as they happen.

To start you off, here are a number of useful links I have found out there that will help, links to software, online publishers, tutorials and so on.
Obviously this list is only a fraction of the available online resources you can find, but it will give you a start, and I hope, save you wasting good writing time as well.

Have fun!   Writing is a real pleasure.

SOFTWARE:

Calibre 
Already reviewed here, click here.

Adobe InDesign
Very expensive, but it does it all. 
Book Glutton
A company who can do the conversions for you and who provide the software needed to get it into a form they can use.

Stanza
A rather intriguing site who offer software that enables you to make your book readable on iPods among other things.
Editplus
Text editor, HTML editor, PHP editor and Java editor
Dream Weaver:
The Grand Daddy of them all, but not cheap!!!!


SITES THAT YOU CAN UPLOAD YOUR BOOKS TO:
Smashwords

See review of this site here (link) 

eBook Cross roads

Directory of eBook publishers 

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The above stuff is obviously only the tip of a very big iceberg, so I shall be adding to it as I find new and interesting things, but, you can also help out here, if you have a favourite piece of software you use in preparing your books for ePublication, or know of an amazing site that helps, or provides tools for writers, please do let me know, and I shall add what you tell us to this blog, and of course, credit you with the information too.