So, are still going to be able to get out your second edition on your own?

I’m not a big fan of old media. I think this is just a natural response to organizations that have been able to “monopolize” the market, a new technology comes out and they are useless since they are not willing to change with the times. It’s a good thing, since it gets rid of bloat and creates higher quality products. Sorry to hear you got messed up with a dinosaur!

Dear Stephen,

It is indeed a loss that OReilly has stopped production of your book. Furthermore, they have also removed it from their Safari Books Online library, citing the following explanation – “Although rare, there are instances when a title must be removed and generally occurs when the publisher has lost electronic rights distribution for a particular title.”

I have been reading your latest book, “Now You See It”, and have found it illuminating thus far.

I had read “Information Dashboard Design” some time back, and found it very informative. My review of the book, at http://blog.abhinavagarwal.net/2009/01/information-dashboard-design.html

I look forward to the second edition of IDD. Is there an e-book version expected? E-book formats have evolved considerably over the last couple of years, and it may be possible to preserve the layout, formatting, and colors of a book on design.

Kind Regards, Abhinav

For us non-insiders: when you say self-publishing, but you are also working with a 3rd party (Analytics), how does that differ from traditional publishers? I know you say you keep control. What’s the split vs 85-90% to the publisher? Are you personally doing the work of laying out every page, selecting paper stock, hiring a cover artist and so on?

It feels from the outside that Tim got sucked in to the Obama hype with Gov 2.0 and all that. Again from the outside, it doesn’t look like any of that really panned out. Perhaps the distraction is keeping him away from being detail-orientated at O’Reilly.

Your story about O’Reilly Media makes me sad. But I’m not surprised that the experience didn’t live up to your expectations.

My own experience with a different highly-regarded technical publisher also was underwhelming in similar respects. Minimal effort went into marketing my book. The people I worked with were likable and competent, but bureaucracy dictated the way things got done. The publisher handled routine requests efficiently, but anything out of the ordinary, well, fuhgeddaboudit.

I consider myself fortunate I didn’t get into any disputes with the publisher. My contract was pretty close to the publisher’s “standard” contract. The publisher observed the letter and spirit of the agreement, so for me it was 100% gold.

I think the foregoing is just the nature of the beast, perhaps even the best one can expect. If you want things done your way with proper attention to detail, you gotta do them yourself. I suppose you now know that.

I’m an author who went through not one, not two, but three disappointing experiences with a major book publisher. I have another book in the works, but instead of going through a publisher I’m publishing it myself.

If publishers don’t aggressively market an author’s books, what good are they?

Hi Stephen, as an interaction/workflows designer with a love of data, I loved IDD. Luckily I got an earlier edition and not one of those horrible misprints!

I quit publishing for good after a similar experience with O’Reilly, earlier in the cycle. While my book never made it to market, they tried to screw me as well. After three of my coauthors quit in succession, I was left writing the book alone. It was a herculean task but I kept at it, even took days off work to work on it, until the day they emailed me and said, “Your book is late. You can’t cancel and you can’t slip any further.” Their exact words: “You can’t cancel and you can’t slip.”

Well, that’s not what my contract said. I told them to stuff it and I canceled.

This was *after* they had already created ill will by begging community leaders to tech edit for free, for sending the wrong chapters to reviewers at the wrong time and thus wasting their time on half-finished work, etc., etc. They gave me basically zero editorial support. That was in 2006. I had done tech editing work for years for “lesser” tech publishers like Que and Sam. Those “lesser” publishers actually paid – up to $4 a page. As a former TE, and somebody who had to live & work in the programming community, I was appalled at O’Reilly’s cheapness. They got a great rep early on and have been trading on it, and coasting downhill, ever since. What a shame.

Since then I’ve self-published two ebooks and a long-form written course. I won’t be going back to traditional publishing unless a publisher offers me a very special carrot indeed.

Stephen, how much work does Analytics Press typically do for an author who is self-publishing? What are they charging you for and at what rates?

(The following comment is from Tim O’Reilly, with Stephen’s responses inserted in blue.)

While I was not directly involved in your discussions with the editorial team at O’Reilly, I have looked into your allegations, and would like an opportunity to respond.

A couple of salient facts that your readers of this post might want to know:

1. It is our interpretation of your contract that we had the right to produce a second edition, but we also agreed that you had the right to terminate the contract.

Actually, this is not true. O’Reilly Media did not agree that I had the right to terminate the contract. In fact, that right does not exist in the contract. When O’Reilly was in breach of contract the first time, because the contract did not clearly state what would happen if you failed to honor it, your publisher, Laurie Petrycki, sicked the lawyers on me when I asked that my rights be honored. Only when you eventually got involved at my request was the matter resolved through an addendum to the contract that clearly spelled out that you were required to surrender your rights to the book immediately if you were ever again in breach of contract. Even with the addendum, I had no right to terminate the contract. Instead, you were required to surrender your rights if you failed to abide by it. That’s quite different.

So when you said you wanted the rights back so you could self-publish the second edition yourself, we accepted that. That is hardly a soulless machine that gives no regard to the interests of authors.

Also, not true. When I informed Petrycki that I had written a second edition of the book and was planning for it to be published by Analytics Press, she told me that I had no choice but to have O’Reilly publish it. This was not true, because the existing contract only covered the existing edition. I pointed this out to Petrycki, and she again said that I had no choice but to either have the book published through O’Reilly or not at all. Essentially, she said that, unless I agreed to the terms that O’Reilly offered, I was out of luck and would have no opportunity to publish my book, period. Yes, this was a soulless response.

Not only that, when we reverted the rights, we agreed to provide you with all the design files so that you could print additional copies of the first edition yourself.

This didn’t happen as you described. You did not agree to revert your rights to me. When I pointed out how you had been in breach of the contract several times and that, as such, according to the addendum to the contract you were required to surrender your rights, Petrycki ignored me and once again said that the book could not be published, except by O’Reilly. When I stood my ground and pointed out the breach of contract a second time, Petrycki turned the matter over to your attorney who sent me a release form absolving O’Reilly of all responsibility for the breach, and demanded that I sign it before O’Reilly would surrender its rights as contractually required. At that time, I said that I would gladly sign the release—something that I was not required to do—if you agreed to continue selling the book through June. Your opportunity to continue selling the book for a reasonable period of time after surrendering your rights to it were guaranteed in the contract. Continuing to sell the book through June would have provided you with additional revenues and would have provided books for readers, approximately 300 students who will be attending my workshops between now and July, and for students who use the book in university courses. Your attorney was instructed by Petrycki to deny my request. I am still waiting for you to surrender your rights to my book. Even though I first contacted O’Reilly about this on December 6, 2012, I still have not received the Adobe InDesign files from you.

2. Because of your exacting design requirements, the book is a four-color book printed in Italy, with a 6-8 week reprint lead time, and a cost that is highly dependent on the number of copies printed. We have only just run out of stock; effectively, you wanted us to print enough stock for only three months of sales. This would drive up the unit cost dramatically.

The book does not need to be printed in Italy. It can be printed here in the United States much more quickly. You usually have it printed in Italy to save costs. This makes sense when you have the time. You ran out of stock because, when I first approached Petrycki, she immediately put a stop to process that was already in motion to print additional copies of the book, but she did not inform me of this fact. I discovered this when I recently placed a book order for one of my workshops as was told that it was out of stock because Petrycki canceled the planned printing. Had the printing proceeded as planned, the books would have already arrived. Because your attorney has engaged in a series of delay tactics and still has not delivered the Adobe InDesign files to me, I have been prevented from having additional copies of the book printed myself. By the time that I receive the files, it will be too late to supply my workshops. What Petrycki did was an intentional act of spite.

By the time I even heard about the issue, you were asking for a reprint that has a two month lead time with only three months to go before you were planning to publish the second edition. (You had originally told us that you were going to publish the second edition in June; in your account above, I see that has now slipped to July.)

I informed O’Reilly Media of my intention on December 6, 2012. I did not hear back from Petrycki until late January, over a month and a half later. I was not responsible for any of the delay. You only became aware of the situation personally about a week ago because I contacted you and asked for your help to cut through the crap. Had Petrycki done her job, the additional copies of the book that will be needed to supply demand through June would have arrived in early February.

This is one of the real problems with the old-fashioned printing methods that are the only ones that seem to provide the quality you insist on. You have to buy large print runs, which don’t always line up neatly with real-world demand, requiring large investments in inventory. We’ve moved to print-on-demand for many of our books (even for four-color books such as yours), but that leads to precisely the kind of quality tradeoff that you insist you don’t want. Print-on-demand allows for continuous availability as well as for sudden spikes in demand.

Given my self-publishing experience, I’m very familiar with the printing process. You don’t have to buy print runs that are larger than the 1,500 copies or so that would have been needed to fill orders through June. Yes, it costs more per book when you print fewer copies, but you would have still made plenty of money. You get to keep 85% of net revenues. Even printing a small quantity, you would have made a nice profit. Also, you don’t need to rely on print-on-demand to maintain continuous availability, you simply plan ahead, which is your job. I manage to maintain availability of my other books just fine.

But in any case, it is normal publishing practice to let a first edition lapse in the months before availability of a new edition. If you’re a consumer, the last thing you want to see is a new, improved edition of a book a few days or weeks after you just paid for what is now the out-of-date edition.

Whether this is normal publishing practice, I can’t say, but it is not my practice because my books are continuously needed for the workshops that I teach and for the university courses in which they are used.

In short, there is no “spite” in the decision not to reprint the book.

The facts suggest otherwise.

I’m sorry you and your students got caught in a squeeze here. Given that we have reverted the rights to you, you can most certainly consider reprinting the first edition yourself, perhaps using print-on demand and accepting some reduction in quality to meet the gap in availability.

This squeeze that I and my students are caught in didn’t just happen, it was manufactured. As I pointed out above, by the time that you finally provide me with the necessary files, it will be too late to have them printed in time. Even if I had the time, Petrycki has denied me the right to use the ISBN number that currently exists for the book, which means that I would need to set up a new ISBN with resellers such as Amazon, which takes additional time.

I wish you well with your self-publishing endeavor. I started out as a self-published author myself, and built up my company from there. It’s more challenging than many authors imagine, but it’s most certainly doable. But it does put you in touch with the messy realities (and economics) of manufacturing, inventory management, and distribution that make this kind of difficult situation come up from time to time.

The only messiness that I’ve experienced related to publishing is that which has been caused by O’Reilly. Compared to that, self-publishing has been a breeze.

If you want to see if print-on-demand could satisfy your requirements to produce copies of the first edition until the second is ready, I’m sure we could connect you with some appropriate vendors.

As you know, print-on-demand cannot satisfy the requirements of books like mine. As you pointed out in an email to me, you have written books yourself that require offset four-color printing, which you would never allow to be printed on an on-demand laser printer.

Tim – I brought you into the loop on this matter because I thought that you would choose to handle things more ethically and rationally than Petrycki. I’m disappointed to find that you support these bad practices. Given the fact that it is in your power to correct Petrycki’s bad behavior, it appears that the loss of soul at O’Reilly has spread farther than I wanted to believe. What a shame.

I published my first 15 books through traditional means and can’t imagine doing so now, for many of the same reasons that have been discussed by Stephen and the others here. Self-publishing is so much more satisfying, and unless you are seeking to write the Great American Novel, book revenue is just not what it used to be. (I treat my book more like a business card than a literary work and practically give away the PDF version if it might lead to business.)

The big challenge is the self part of self-publishing. With a background in desktop publishing, I create final PDF entirely myself, hiring only editors. Without that background, it would be a much heavier lift, and I’m not sure if I would have the patience for it. That is more of a self-commentary than one on the business, but there you go…

I am a good candidate for self-publishing because:
* I do virtually all of the interior layout of the book, delivering camera-ready files
* I do not need — or care — about marketing

But I still feel it is worth it for me (not everyone) to go through a traditional publisher including O’Reilly because I want to focus and spend my time on one and ONLY one thing: creating. I don’t want to spend a moment researching and handling the business side, and when you have books being translated into dozens of languages, negotiating foreign distribution rights, etc. etc., this is a big deal. I know a lot of self-published authors who simply don’t have those foreign translation and/or distribution and licensing deals, and it is, for me, a non-trivial amount of my income, thanks to O’Reilly.

I, too, am disappointed that Tim is no longer involved much with the publishing side.

Oh yeah, just wanted to add that there ARE some really amazing people still at O’Reilly media, including several I believe still reflect the “soul” of O’Reilly. The business came dangerously close to death in the dot-com crash, and they became more business-focused to stay alive. But that near-death experience also caused Tim, at least, to be even MORE open to trying new things (“what do we have to lose?”) even while others became more conservative. It was during that time that O’Reilly agreed to take on a book by a total no-name (me) in a bizarre format that was strongly turned down by other publishers. Even many within O’Reilly at the time hated the idea of my first book and some nearly quit the company over it. It was Tim and a few others (our fabulous editor Mike Loukidies, and some marketing folks) who believed in it. That decision has kept some people at O’Reilly employed over the subsequent years. — as that flatly-rejected series has since sold more than two million print copies alone.

Every now and then I wonder what it would be like to have self-published and gotten a much bigger chunk of the income from the book. But it takes me about ten seconds to realize that for me, this would be absurd. I would be trading away the best parts of my brain’s limited energy each day in order to do all the other things O’Reilly does, most of which I never have to think about. I have had my fair share of squabbles with some of them, some quite stressful, but taking the long view, wow, they have REALLY had my back. I trust them not just far more than any other publisher, but also far more than I would ever trust myself to do what they have done with the books.

If I was developing something for a very small niche, and did not anticipate big demand, or need foreign rights dealt with, etc. I would probably self-publish. Indeed I have a couple of hobby non-tech projects that will be self-published ebooks. But if there is a chance that what you are creating could be *big*, a publisher (or at least O’Reilly) can make that happen. Also, anyone who expects a publisher to do marketing is just kidding themselves, and I wish publishers would quit using that as a selling point. And it really makes almost no difference… when it comes to books on topics that are already in demand, it pretty much IS a meritocracy. Not based on *objective quality*, because nobody knows what that means for a technical book. But he/she who builds the book that helps the target audience do whatever it is they were hoping to do, doesn’t need a marketing campaign. For a tech book, marketing makes a different mostly when there is a huge pile of books on the same topic, and none of them appear to have any other significant differentiating competitive advantage. But I would not want to pour a year of my life into making a book that had no real advantage over other books, and by “advantage” I mean in a way that reader’s perceive as useful and valuable for them. The tech world is overflowing with extremely high-quality books that too few actual readers find usable or approachable. And I blame the “write a book as a big heavy business card / cred” as the problem. It is not easy to create a book/user experience that simultaneously makes the author look smart AND actually makes the reader smarter. These two goals are nearly incompatible unless you are writing purely for an audience that is in the top % of programmers AND pretty much already knows the technology.
We’re not talking about writing for dummies; we are talking about writing for, say, the astronaut who does not know this technology. In other words, smart person with limited time, no prior experience, who doesn’t want to waste time trying to parse a technically-correct-but-completely-obscure paragraph. And there is plenty of evidence that most technical books fall into this category, including — often ESPECIALLY — the most technically accurate, comprehensive, and intelligently-written ones. High quality must factor in the user/reader experience and results.

Stephen, I can accept that my books– and my experiences — might be unique. Not everyone there was someone I wanted to work with, but we were able to have more of a say in who we worked with than most, so I really don’t know how it would have been otherwise. And we did have one major incident that relates to what you’re saying about quality: when one of the earlier books was being put on Safari, we expected that it would of course be a PDF, because it was designed to be extremely depending on very precise layouts. The code was blended with graphics and annotations, etc. The first time they put up one of the books in XML, it was a disaster and completely unusable. I was DEEPLY upset that nobody thought to review what the process had done to the book (and especially the code). There was some pushback by some people, or at the least they felt I was dramatically over-reacting (I wasn’t. As it seems you know– you don’t make good books without fighting for the user experience at every moment). Granted, this layout-heavy book did not lend itself to their normal process in any way, but still… But they DID take it down within less than 24 hours. They definitely did the right thing, though I was still a little upset that the people I was dealing with at the time weren’t themselves deeply disturbed by having a book like that *available*, even for a nano-second.
I suppose nobody cares about your book as much as you do, but I don’t mind being a pain in the ass to do it. And it does sound like your experience was nothing like mine. If it means that I was lucky to get “the good people”, I’m grateful. Just as my mostly *good* experiences don’t in any way take away what happened with yours, the bad experiences you’ve had I don’t believe reflect O’Reilly as a whole, with or without Tim. The soul is still there, even if a little less visible.

Thanks for your post. I always wondered about O’Reilly.

Sadly, traditional publishers seem to be getting worse in their dealings with authors instead of improving.

I have been self-publishing for over 20 years, having self-published my first book in 1989. But I also have had some of my books published by traditional publishers, such as “The Joy of Not Working” which was originally self-published, but which I turned over to Ten Speed Press in 1997. The relationship that I had with Ten Speed Press was great until Random House purchased Ten Speed Press in 2009. Since then it’s been downhill.

When Random House bought Ten Speed Press, they immediately cancelled the distribution Agreement I had with Ten Speed Press for the distribution of my self-published “How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free”, but Random House wanted to take over the publication of the book in a normal publisher/author relationship. This would have meant that I would be earning less than a third of what I was earning with the book being self-published.

Despite the fact many people would love to have a book published by a major publisher such as Random House, I had the pleasure of rejecting Random House.

I immediately got National Book Network to distribute “How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free” for me and it has been selling about 40 better than it was selling in the last eight months that it was with Random House/Ten Speed Press. In fact, in 2012 the book had its best year ever (with 18,600 copies sold in the print edition in the U.S. and Canada) since it was published in 2004.

I am already well over $150,000 ahead in profits by having rejected Random House and over the next few years I will earn several hundreds of thousand of dollars more.

Moral of the story: Self-publishing can be much more profitable than being published by a major publisher!

Ernie J. Zelinski

Thanks for sharing the experience. It seem more and more creatives (writers,musicians, filmmakers) are needing the big companies to market and distribute their work. They do charge alot of very little guaranteed return.

Jon,

With today’s relatively high-resolution screens, graphics can potentially look fine on mobile reading devices, but many of them are not large enough for many graphics. For example, many of the figures that appear in my books need more space than is available on a Kindle to be clearly seen. An iPad and other devices of similar size can display most graphics nicely, but graphics that were formatted for a printed book are not properly formatted for an iPad. For example, I design my books to be read as two-page spreads (a left-hand and right-hand page) that are simultaneously visible to the reader. If I make my books available in PDF form so they can be read on an iPad, only one page at a time can be displayed because a two-page spread makes everything too small to read. But when I designed it for a two-page spread, I was able to place figures on the facing page rather than the page on which the text appears that is associated with the figure, if necessary, because it would still be visible to the reader. I think that it is important, whenever possible, to allow the reader to see the figure when reading text that applies to it without turning to a different page. It takes a great deal of work to make this possible. For my books to be as readable on an iPad, I would need to design the layout in a way that was appropriate for viewing only one page at a time. This is rather limiting, so I would perhaps want to take advantage of the interactive features of the iPad to make figures appear only when needed in a separate container from the text that could be viewed simultaneously without conflict.

What I’m saying is that reading devices are different from printed books, so the content of books must be designed differently for electronic readers. This is why my books are not yet available in electronic form; I simply haven’t had the time to format them appropriately, but I hope to in time. Currently, most reading devices such as the Kindle ignore the layout of a book when formatting the content for the device, which destroys formatting by reflowing text and figures using automated algorithms that merely attempt to get everything to fit without concern for the reader’s experience. This works fine for novels but not for books that require careful layout.

Josh,

The “recommendations for you” on Amazon are largely controlled by them, without influence from the publisher. It is true, however, that Amazon allows publishers to purchase better placement opportunities, but this can be done by those who self-publish as well. O’Reilly did not pay Amazon to improve the placement of Information Dashboard Design. Its placement was a result of its popularity. The topic of dashboard design is more focused and popular than data visualization in general, so my dashboard book has sold somewhat better than my other two books overall, but I’m not aware of anything that O’Reilly did to influence this. Two years ago when O’Reilly tried to convince me that I should let them publish the second edition of the book, I told them that I was not aware of anything that O’Reilly did to market the first edition, and they were not able to provide any examples to contradict my observation.

Nancy,

Is e-book layout something that you specialize in? If so, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. Also, I’d be interesting in hearing your opinion of the e-book version of Nancy Duarte’s book “Resonate,” if you’ve seen it.

Alistair,

I see that you write for O’Reilly Radar. To partner so intimately with O’Reilly, I suspect that your experience with them has indeed been different from mine. As you yourself point out in your comments, however, your experience with O’Reilly and other large publishers has in fact not been “completely the opposite” of my experience. You too have experienced problems.

Regarding Hanlon’s Razor, “’Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’—or in this case, complexity,” the problems that O’Reilly Media have created in my case are not due to complexity. Their failures to honor the contract have likely been due to incompetence, rooted in the fact that they don’t care enough about their agreements with authors to put the appropriate controls in place to make sure that they honor them. Petrycki’s responses to me have indeed been due to malice. She attempted to bully me into relinquishing my rights. She had her legal team engage in nasty maneuvers to discourage me from pursuing my rights and from getting the files for my book in time to print the additional copies that are needed. This is pure malice, and also stupid business practice.

Regarding the personal nature of my response to O’Reilly, this matter is very personal. I suspect that, if you were in my position, you would understand this and respond much as I have. Acting as matters of this nature have no personal component would be dishonest. People at O’Reilly Media are personally responsible for the wrong that has been done. I have not described thier bad behavior because of a personal vendetta. Rather, as a matter of principle, I believe that we have a responsibility to speak up when wrongs have been done that affect others. If this were not of interest to the public, I would have kept it to myself. As you can tell by responses from others, what I’ve written has struck a chord. I have heard privately from other authors who have had similar experiences.

I have no doubt that Tim O’Reilly does much that is good. It was because I assumed his good character and business acumen that I reached out to him. As you can see in what he wrote to me, which I have no not edited, however, Tim is supporting a series of lies and bad business practices. He did not initiate them, Petrycki did, but by supporting them, he shares responsibility. Ultimately, O’Reilly Media is Tim’s company. Many people who do good also do harm. The good that they do does not excuse them of the harm. I’ve been told by others that Tim has mostly checked out of the publishing business of O’Reilly Media. Perhaps he needs to remember to vision that got him started in this business and do what he can to infuse the company once again with that vision.

Regarding Amazon, I agree with you that they are creating significant problems for the publishing industry. Amazon’s conduct at times is downright nasty, which is unfortunately typical of most large corporations. I would love to see a viable alternative for international book sales.

I don’t understand what you’re suggesting in the second to last paragraph of your comments. O’Reilly Media signed an agreement to publish one of my books. I only needed this one service from them. I certainly don’t want O’Reilly to be involved in other aspects of my work, which they don’t understand. The thought of how this is horrifying. O’Reilly does not need to be involved in other aspects of an author’s work to serve in responsibly carry out their role as a publisher. The fact that O’Reilly has failed to handle my book as well as I–someone who is not a publisher–has been able to handle my other books, should concern them. If I were in their position and had failed to honor my agreement with an author as they have with me, rather than denying all responsibility and becoming intransigent, I would be mortified. I would do everything in my power to make things right. I expect this from every business. We excuse the bad behavior of corporations such as O’Reilly Media far too easily and often. Only by speaking up can we ever hope to change things for the better.

Alistair,

That beer sounds great right about now.

My contract with O’Reilly was unusual at the time, because mine was one of their first design-oriented books, but it was not complex in the least. It simply gave me the right as the author to participate in and have final right of approval over design choices. The parameters for those choices (4-color offset printing, good paper, careful layout, etc.) were all discussed before the contract was signed. For books about design, this is essential, otherwise the author’s reputation can be ruined by a poorly designed book. I’ve seen this happen to books about data visualization. Imagine having your hard work and reputation destroyed by a publisher’s poor design decisions.

Hi again, Stephen.

I believe it’s worth considering e-books, because many people love them. They’re physically smaller (easier to hold; you can travel with whole libraries) and earth-friendly (no paper, no shipping, etc.)

I wish I could say that I could step right up to e-book creation, but I only follow the field — my hands-on experience is in web and UX design and print InDesign work. I got a bit carried away by the fantasy of helping bring my favorite subject to a new medium.

However, I do have opinions based on my reading. I think an author of visually-rich content has to consider several major issues with e-books, which you touched on in your mentions of PDFs, etc:

(a) What should the digital experience be for the reader? Is what’s right for Nancy Duarte’s content right for Stephen Few’s content?

(b) How can a small screen convey the relationships between “content units” such as text, illustrations, asides, footnotes, etc?

(c) What hardware and software would you want to require for readers of your e-book?

The discussion of these turned into a long essay, so I put it over on my blog. I hope you find it worth reading.
http://explanagraphics.com/index.php/2013/03/15/making-an-e-book-of-a-richly-visual-design-oriented-book/

Nancy

I really liked this post. This validates my decisions!

I’ve self published two books,
The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising
The Wild Woman’s Guide to Social Media

And about to self publish a third.

Penelope Trunk has an excellent and funny post about self publishing, check it out!

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2012/07/09/how-i-got-a-big-advance-from-a-big-publisher-and-self-published-anyway/

Peace,

Mazarine

I applaud your resistance to a messed up Kindle edition of your book. Kindle books are too often typographical and layout abominations. But have you explored any other electronic publishing formats?

I hate Kindle when layout matters but the convenience of having lots of content in one place is very high and I would like to find an alternative that works when layout and typography matter.

Omar,

Unfortunately, only a single page at a time can be viewed on the iPad, despite its high resolution. To make my books available on the iPad, I will need to redesign them for single page rather than dual-page reading. This isn’t easy with books like mine that include many figures, many of which are large.

Omar,

My books can certainly be designed for reading on an iPad, and the design could surpass that of the printed books. They don’t exist for the iPad, not because it wouldn’t be useful, but merely because it will take time to design them — time that I haven’t yet been able to set aside. I’m hoping to get to this, but first, I have new book taking shape in my head that is clamoring to get out.

I just picked up a 2nd copy of IDD at Barnes and Noble last week so it’s still being distributed which is good news – or maybe this was a last copy. I also bought your other books but I’ve never been able to find them in book stores. I’ve always ordered them online. Maybe this is on good reason to go with a mainstream publisher? I wish there were ebook versions of your other works but I’ve read your reasons for this elsewhere.