10 reasons why ebooks suck
Apparently, portable readers are on the rise. These allow you to buy digital books and read them on the move. I guess you could read ebooks on these readers, too. While there may be some benefits to reading ebooks offline, there are numerous issues with reading them on your computer when you could just read the content on a blog. Here are 10 reasons why I think ebooks suck, big time.
1. You can't comment.
One of the best things about blogging is being able to interact with your audience. Write a new post, publish it, and some of your readers may add their views. This can't be done with an ebook. Not all topics need to be commented on, though. I wouldn't bother with an ebook if you're hoping to get feedback on each chapter. You might get some limited feedback on the ebook as a whole, perhaps via email, but it's a lot easier to comment on a blog post than to comment on an ebook.
2. Editing is a pain.
If you write a post today, some of it might need to be updated in the future to keep it current. Making changes to a blog post is easy - just click the Edit link, modify it as needed, and publish the updated version. Changing an ebook is a pain, though. First, you have to go back to the original document, and make your changes there. Next, you need to save it as a PDF. Finally, you need to put the file online. This may not seem like a difficult process, but it's incredibly laborious if you have to go through it over and over again.
3. Old copies may still be out there.
With a blog post, the latest version is always on your site. I guess it's possible for readers to save a copy offline, or they might be viewing an earlier version in their feed reader. But I think an ebook is much more likely to be downloaded than a blog post is, so this becomes a bigger problem with ebooks than with blogs. How often will you update your ebook? Maybe not that often, but if you do have to make some changes or you want to write a second edition, you'll struggle to get all of the original readers to come back and download the latest version. Then again, if they do come back and download it again, your stats will include this "double dip" behaviour and it'll seem as though you've had far more downloads than you actually have. Bravo! Or not.
4. PDFs are horrible to navigate.
I once read that the PDF file format was designed to provide an accurate representation of how a document would look when printed. It's far more reliable to print a PDF than, say, saving a document in Microsoft Word but then printing it from Open Office. So, PDFs are great for printing. But that's the whole point. While they do provide ways to navigate the document, I've always found it incredibly painful to browse a large document on my computer than to flick through the pages of a book by hand, or move around a blog. Of course, it's still possible to run a blog that's tough to navigate, especially if you rely on date-based navigation (here's why you should organise your blog in a logical, coherent manner). However, blogs generally give you far greater control over the navigation than PDF does.
5. Information overload.
Admittedly, I'm not much of a reader - at least not when it comes to books. I do read blogs, news sites, Wikipedia and other online material, but I steer clear of books. I much prefer being able to read one or two posts on a blog without feeling the need to read the entire history of that blog before I have some idea of what the blogger's writing about. Sometimes, you do need to go back a few posts to catch up on the history - I vividly remember a blog that went on and on about a monumental event in the author's life, for months and months of posts, and I just couldn't figure out what they were doing, or why! Still, I can usually get the gist of a blog post even if my first visit to the blog is after 50 posts have been written. With an ebook, I have to set time aside to read the whole damn thing. And to be perfectly frank, most of the ebooks I've seen just aren't good enough to justify that amount of time.
6. Too much duplication.
Sure, blogging has plenty of posts that overlap so much, you could probably remove a chunk of other posts and just say it all in one post. I've always felt that ebooks are far worse, though. I've considered the idea of publishing an ebook for Top Ten Blog Tips. Here's how it would go: I'd compile some of the best posts from the site with a few new posts that would probably end up on the site anyway. This might be good for new readers, but long-term readers would get all of the same information, all over again. If I wrote a second or a third ebook, you'd then end up with content that overlapped with the first ebook as well as the site itself. It's like a Greatest Hits compilation - nice for the casual reader, but ultimately it's a marketing ploy where you compile a lot of old stuff in a new package that couldn't possibly be popular. Could it? Oh wait - Greatest Hits compilations seem to go down rather well, don't they? Well, blah! I'm a completist - I'd much rather publish new posts on the blog than cobble together a bunch of unrelated posts into a silly file format with a silly front cover and a silly introduction from me, the author. Then again, maybe it would be popular...
7. Inconsistent design.
Sure, you can include images and styles in your PDF, but you'll be hard pushed to replicate anything but the simplest blog design within the file itself. I guess it's a different medium, so the style rules are different. But I'd much prefer to have a relatively consistent look and feel for all of the products associated with my blog. It looks more professional, and it helps to establish your brand identity. If I were to release a new ebook every week with a totally different look and feel for each one, you may well recognise my name, but would it get new readers to my blog? Or would it just get new readers for the ebook? Hmm, I suppose I could market myself as ME, rather than as Top Ten Blog Tips, which is actually how I do things over at benbarden.com. I'm starting to remember why that blog has started to do a bit better than this one... hmm... anyway, moving on...
8. Who downloads but doesn't read?
If 100 people download your ebook but only 25 actually read it, what can you conclude from that? It may not be a reflection on the quality of your writing, but it shows that the entry barrier is quite a bit higher with ebooks than with a blog. You can counter this by using a killer title for your ebook, and publish some sample content on your site, but some people simply won't download it because it's too much effort to do so. Now that may sound silly, and it probably is, but you have to grab the attention of your readers or they won't stick around. Hiding your best content in an ebook may not be the most sensible choice. On the other hand, if you only put your worst content in an ebook, then that's not good either! How do you keep things balanced?
9. Search engine difficulties.
Amongst other types of file, Google includes PDF documents in its search results. I don't know about you, but if I see a PDF in the results, I'll almost always skip it. It's faster and easier to read a web page than to read a PDF. Well, unless the web page is plastered with ads and widgets, then it's a different story! Another issue I've found with finding a PDF in Google is that clicking the link may not always take you to the relevant page in the document - you'll end up on the first page. It's for this reason that I usually avoid PDF documents if I can help it.
10. PDF readers just aren't that great.
The humble web browser is incredibly simple to use. It has plenty of handy settings such as bookmarks, tabbed browsing, and a Google search box. PDF documents sometimes open in your browser, but in a clunky plugin that seems to slow everything down. Either that, or it opens a separate reader that is such a disaster, it sometimes makes me close the reader as soon as I realise I just opened a PDF (it's not always clear until you actually click on a link!). Then we get the infamous "upgrade" dialog along with massive downloads for what should be a very simple piece of software. I think things have improved since I last used Windows (I moved to Ubuntu earlier this year), but Adobe Reader is one of my least favourite software packages of all time. It completely ruins the PDF "experience" for me and was one of the underlying reasons for writing this post. But once I thought about it some more, I found plenty of reasons why PDFs - and ebooks in general - suck. To be fair, it's more the technology that's the problem than the actual ebook itself, but the issues are so serious that I usually link the two together.
So - that's how I feel about ebooks. You may have noticed I have not completely ruled out ebooks as an option though, as I did come up with a few benefits as I wrote this post. Overall though, I hate them with a passion. If I produce a PDF someday, it's not because I think PDFs are great, it's because I think people might actually read it. I generally don't read them.
What do you think?
How to Suck at Writing, and then Write for the Biggest Blogs in the World
This is a guest post by Danny Wong. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Writing hasn’t always been a skill of mine. I rarely ever read when I was younger, and still had my father read me books for years after I had learned how to read for myself.
So how did I go from a forced writer (I only wrote things when I had to for school and never for recreation) to an influential blogger?
I started writing for our business blog just because we needed content creators. I was new to this whole Social Media thing, and I could hardly write coherent content, nevertheless quality content. I dreaded it.
We quickly killed my future contributions to the blog because I wasn’t enjoying it, the content wasn’t incredibly beneficial or engaging, and instead I focused more efforts on things I could do to really impact the business.
So I turned to learning how to manage Public Relations because I thought, “If I can’t inbound any visitors to the site and business blog by writing quality content, then let me go out and get traffic from other people’s sites and blogs.”
So I spent a lot of time schmoozing bloggers and writers and then I closed a feature article with a writer on a site called Examiner.com. I thought it was the neatest thing to have such a high traffic site featuring me since it had millions of unique visitors a month. After reading and reveling in the feature article, I saw a Call-To-Action saying, “Write for us” and I thought, “Hm. This seems like an interesting opportunity to build brand awareness through links in my byline and increase my personal brand by just being a (sort of) professional writer.”
The CTA called to me and I answered. Using a referral from the writer that featured me, I ended up becoming the Boston Startup Examiner, and then things just snowballed from there. I starting reading blogs like DailyBlogTips, reading more content on Examiner and other news-oriented blogs, and then starting doing guest posts any blogs that would take my work!
Then I just kept stumbling upon opportunities, and quickly built relationships with lots of editors through my formal PR work and then reached out to them with a guest post ready for their review.
Finally, I started publishing on some of the biggest sites in their niche, like SearchEngineJournal and a local NY Times blog, and then I started publishing on some of the biggest blogs in the world like TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.
Now, I have a blogger account with the world’s #1 blog, HuffingtonPost, and I have a pretty strong portfolio of writings published in an even stronger set of blogs, which gives me leverage when trying to publish articles on other sites when I can say, “My name is Danny Wong and I have contributed writings to NY Times (blog), HuffingtonPost, ReadWriteWeb, TheNextWeb and Examiner.”
Just to break down how I went from sucking at writing to writing for some of the world’s biggest blogs:
1. I had a relationship with a writer at a media outlet that had open invitations for writers to join, and spent way too many hours crafting my application writings as well as my first few posts.
2. I was reading more blogs and books, and spent more time writing blog posts that I would never publish just for the sake of practicing writing.
3. I started publishing anywhere and everywhere that would talk to a small-time writer like me, especially one that had some interesting thoughts and experience in startups and entrepreneurship.
4. Some of the bigger blogs I read had published guest posts on their site, so I contacted the first person I knew who was a writer (a relationship I built through my PR work) and asked how I might become a contributor. Sometimes, I was directed to the editor who would then request I submit a post to them directly, or I would have already had contact with an editor who was anxious to see how I could contribute to their business.
5. The bigger sites bit. Admittedly, I did spend several hours writing my first post for each outlet, but it was well worth the time investment because I started the relationship off on the right foot, and then became a semi-frequent contributor.
6. I name-dropped all the different media outlets I had contributed to when pitching myself to publish with a new media outlet, so things just snowballed as I built up my credibility. As I became more credible after publishing posts with more and more influential blogs, the bigger blogs started to pay attention to me and were more than happy to take my contributions.
It took quite a bit of hard work, networking and determination to build up my writing skills and my writing portfolio so now I can proudly say I am a blogger with the #1 blog in the world and write for several of the biggest blogs out there.
What tactics did you use to publish with big blogs and sites?
About the author: Danny Wong is a writer at HuffingtonPost (you can see his column here), the #1 blog in the world, and the co-founder of co-created dress shirts startup, Blank Label.
Original Post: How to Suck at Writing, and then Write for the Biggest Blogs in the World
10 reasons why ebooks suck
Apparently, portable readers are on the rise. These allow you to buy digital books and read them on the move. I guess you could read ebooks on these readers, too. While there may be some benefits to reading ebooks offline, there are numerous issues with reading them on your computer when you could just read the content on a blog. Here are 10 reasons why I think ebooks suck, big time.
1. You can't comment.
One of the best things about blogging is being able to interact with your audience. Write a new post, publish it, and some of your readers may add their views. This can't be done with an ebook. Not all topics need to be commented on, though. I wouldn't bother with an ebook if you're hoping to get feedback on each chapter. You might get some limited feedback on the ebook as a whole, perhaps via email, but it's a lot easier to comment on a blog post than to comment on an ebook.
2. Editing is a pain.
If you write a post today, some of it might need to be updated in the future to keep it current. Making changes to a blog post is easy - just click the Edit link, modify it as needed, and publish the updated version. Changing an ebook is a pain, though. First, you have to go back to the original document, and make your changes there. Next, you need to save it as a PDF. Finally, you need to put the file online. This may not seem like a difficult process, but it's incredibly laborious if you have to go through it over and over again.
3. Old copies may still be out there.
With a blog post, the latest version is always on your site. I guess it's possible for readers to save a copy offline, or they might be viewing an earlier version in their feed reader. But I think an ebook is much more likely to be downloaded than a blog post is, so this becomes a bigger problem with ebooks than with blogs. How often will you update your ebook? Maybe not that often, but if you do have to make some changes or you want to write a second edition, you'll struggle to get all of the original readers to come back and download the latest version. Then again, if they do come back and download it again, your stats will include this "double dip" behaviour and it'll seem as though you've had far more downloads than you actually have. Bravo! Or not.
4. PDFs are horrible to navigate.
I once read that the PDF file format was designed to provide an accurate representation of how a document would look when printed. It's far more reliable to print a PDF than, say, saving a document in Microsoft Word but then printing it from Open Office. So, PDFs are great for printing. But that's the whole point. While they do provide ways to navigate the document, I've always found it incredibly painful to browse a large document on my computer than to flick through the pages of a book by hand, or move around a blog. Of course, it's still possible to run a blog that's tough to navigate, especially if you rely on date-based navigation (here's why you should organise your blog in a logical, coherent manner). However, blogs generally give you far greater control over the navigation than PDF does.
5. Information overload.
Admittedly, I'm not much of a reader - at least not when it comes to books. I do read blogs, news sites, Wikipedia and other online material, but I steer clear of books. I much prefer being able to read one or two posts on a blog without feeling the need to read the entire history of that blog before I have some idea of what the blogger's writing about. Sometimes, you do need to go back a few posts to catch up on the history - I vividly remember a blog that went on and on about a monumental event in the author's life, for months and months of posts, and I just couldn't figure out what they were doing, or why! Still, I can usually get the gist of a blog post even if my first visit to the blog is after 50 posts have been written. With an ebook, I have to set time aside to read the whole damn thing. And to be perfectly frank, most of the ebooks I've seen just aren't good enough to justify that amount of time.
6. Too much duplication.
Sure, blogging has plenty of posts that overlap so much, you could probably remove a chunk of other posts and just say it all in one post. I've always felt that ebooks are far worse, though. I've considered the idea of publishing an ebook for Top Ten Blog Tips. Here's how it would go: I'd compile some of the best posts from the site with a few new posts that would probably end up on the site anyway. This might be good for new readers, but long-term readers would get all of the same information, all over again. If I wrote a second or a third ebook, you'd then end up with content that overlapped with the first ebook as well as the site itself. It's like a Greatest Hits compilation - nice for the casual reader, but ultimately it's a marketing ploy where you compile a lot of old stuff in a new package that couldn't possibly be popular. Could it? Oh wait - Greatest Hits compilations seem to go down rather well, don't they? Well, blah! I'm a completist - I'd much rather publish new posts on the blog than cobble together a bunch of unrelated posts into a silly file format with a silly front cover and a silly introduction from me, the author. Then again, maybe it would be popular...
7. Inconsistent design.
Sure, you can include images and styles in your PDF, but you'll be hard pushed to replicate anything but the simplest blog design within the file itself. I guess it's a different medium, so the style rules are different. But I'd much prefer to have a relatively consistent look and feel for all of the products associated with my blog. It looks more professional, and it helps to establish your brand identity. If I were to release a new ebook every week with a totally different look and feel for each one, you may well recognise my name, but would it get new readers to my blog? Or would it just get new readers for the ebook? Hmm, I suppose I could market myself as ME, rather than as Top Ten Blog Tips, which is actually how I do things over at benbarden.com. I'm starting to remember why that blog has started to do a bit better than this one... hmm... anyway, moving on...
8. Who downloads but doesn't read?
If 100 people download your ebook but only 25 actually read it, what can you conclude from that? It may not be a reflection on the quality of your writing, but it shows that the entry barrier is quite a bit higher with ebooks than with a blog. You can counter this by using a killer title for your ebook, and publish some sample content on your site, but some people simply won't download it because it's too much effort to do so. Now that may sound silly, and it probably is, but you have to grab the attention of your readers or they won't stick around. Hiding your best content in an ebook may not be the most sensible choice. On the other hand, if you only put your worst content in an ebook, then that's not good either! How do you keep things balanced?
9. Search engine difficulties.
Amongst other types of file, Google includes PDF documents in its search results. I don't know about you, but if I see a PDF in the results, I'll almost always skip it. It's faster and easier to read a web page than to read a PDF. Well, unless the web page is plastered with ads and widgets, then it's a different story! Another issue I've found with finding a PDF in Google is that clicking the link may not always take you to the relevant page in the document - you'll end up on the first page. It's for this reason that I usually avoid PDF documents if I can help it.
10. PDF readers just aren't that great.
The humble web browser is incredibly simple to use. It has plenty of handy settings such as bookmarks, tabbed browsing, and a Google search box. PDF documents sometimes open in your browser, but in a clunky plugin that seems to slow everything down. Either that, or it opens a separate reader that is such a disaster, it sometimes makes me close the reader as soon as I realise I just opened a PDF (it's not always clear until you actually click on a link!). Then we get the infamous "upgrade" dialog along with massive downloads for what should be a very simple piece of software. I think things have improved since I last used Windows (I moved to Ubuntu earlier this year), but Adobe Reader is one of my least favourite software packages of all time. It completely ruins the PDF "experience" for me and was one of the underlying reasons for writing this post. But once I thought about it some more, I found plenty of reasons why PDFs - and ebooks in general - suck. To be fair, it's more the technology that's the problem than the actual ebook itself, but the issues are so serious that I usually link the two together.
So - that's how I feel about ebooks. You may have noticed I have not completely ruled out ebooks as an option though, as I did come up with a few benefits as I wrote this post. Overall though, I hate them with a passion. If I produce a PDF someday, it's not because I think PDFs are great, it's because I think people might actually read it. I generally don't read them.
What do you think?