OneBookShelf operates digital download marketplaces focused on several publishing areas like roleplaying games, comic books, and environmental resources for green living. We also serve as a service-provider partner for content holders looking to set-up their own digital download e-commerce solutions. We work with over 600 publishers delivering over 18,000 different titles to hundreds of thousands of customers.

 




Frequently Asked Questions from Publishers

How does this all work?
What price should I set for ebook editions?
What type of files do I need for digital download sales?
What if I don't have an electronic file?

 

How does this all work?
As a creator or publisher, you license OneBookShelf to sell digital download copies of your content. We work with you to prepare your content for digital delivery. In the case of books, you can either output your books to PDF format (or other formats) from your original layout files, or send us hardcopies to digitize. Once your content is loaded on the marketplace, we begin to market and sell your titles. As your content sells, you get real-time sales reporting and your share of sales proceeds goes into your publisher royalty account. We send you checks every month or you can receive automatic payments via Paypal.

You can change your download pricing, what products are available for sale, upload new titles, run free marketplace promotions and many other things from your publisher menu on the marketplace.

What price should I set for ebook editions?
For downloaded ebooks, customers expect to pay less than the price of the printed version of the book on internet merchant sites like Amazon. Because you incur no printing or freight costs on the sale of an ebook, and because your royalty percentage on the sale of the ebook is much higher than typical trade discounts on hardcopy distribution, you will still make more profit margin on the sale of an ebook than on the sale of a hardcopy edition, even when the ebook is priced 35-50% off the hardcopy suggested retail price.

There are exceptions to every rule. If you have a title that is for a specialty market and the hardcopy edition is out of print and difficult to find, then you may choose to price the digital edition the same as the original print edition SRP.

There are also special marketing considerations. You might offer the first title in a series at a lower price or even free to entice new readers into the series (the razor and razor blades strategy).

What type of files do I need for digital download sales?
While we can offer any sort of file, we recommend the following formats:

Video: We recommend H.264/MPEG-4.

Audio: We recommend MP3. For an album or collection of more than four MP3 tracks, it's best to ZIP the files into one ZIP file folder.

Books: We strongly recommend PDF format. This allows several key features of our marketplace to best present and protect your titles.

Our recommended specifications for creating your PDF file are as follows:

The normal format for PDF's is to have page 1 be the front cover; Page 2 is the back cover; and then those are followed by the interiors.

You may wish to rewrite your PDF's from the original desktop publishing files with the following settings: black and white Images should be set to 150 DPI; color and grayscale images should be set to 72 DPI; and both of these should have the maximum compression available.

If you already have existing PDF's, there are a number of ways to reduce the files size. If you are using Adobe Acrobat, you can select the reduce files size option from the pull down menu and save a smaller version. A good target size for a black and white book of about 200 pages is under 10 megs. In general though file size is not a problem until you get over 100 MB file size.

For our watermarking security process to work PDF files must be unlocked (so it can still be edited). We add the watermark at checkout and then lock the file.

Products can have more than one file associated with them. If there are several booklets to a product, you can keep each one a separate PDF file. If there are accessories to the main book they can each remain their own file.

Maps, posters and counters can just be done as jpegs. For large maps it is convenient for the customer to include both a jpeg of the full map and individual jpegs of the map split into page-size pieces for printing. All of the map files can then be zipped into one file for easier delivery.

What if I don't have an electronic file?
If you never had or no longer have the original electronic desktop publishing files for your book, then we can digitize the book for you. OneBookShelf has the staff, the equipment and the software to digitize your hardcopies and covert them to PDFs. Unlock new sales for out-of-print backlist by letting us convert them to digital format for you. We use high-quality scanning equipment along with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software which captures the text from your title so it is searchable in the resulting PDF.

The best part is that there is no cost for the service. We simply take a 10% higher fee on the sales of titles we scan in order to pay for our time and equipment as your title sells on our marketplace. There is no cost to you apart from shipping us one copy of each title. Titles are normally destroyed during the scanning process, so if you need a title back, please e-mail us before shipping it..

Please contact publisherservice@onebookshelf.com to arrange shipment of hardcopy products to us.

Please email or speak to your OneBookShelf publisher service representative before shipping titles.

 



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