ExeBook Manual
ExeBook Overview Introduction to ExeBook. What ExeBook features. How book writers can start self publish their books. What ExeBook offers to a reader...Creating Your ExeBook
User's manual for ExeBook Publisher Software.
Publishing Your ExeBook
What do to after you have your ExeBook created. How to make it available on the internet, promote and sell it.
You can click underlined links to go to specified section
ExeBook Overview
Introducing ExeBook. The ExeBook concept is to use the existing online market.
This software market has been around for years, but few have utilised it's full
potential.
ExeBook allows you to convert your book into a piece of software and start using
all existing services for promotion and sales.
The largest internet problem is piracy. The fact that some one may purchase your
e-book and then copy/paste it into his web page hosted on the free server make
authors and publishers incorrectly say, "Hmm, let's wait until some protection
for e-books will become available." There are millions of copies of software sold on the net and software is
nothing else but the same piece of information as the book. Software publishers
have figured out effective methods to fight piracy. ExeBook uses the same
methods to protect your book. The book is being converted into an executable
file and protected in the same manner as software developers protect their
products.
Then publish it on the web. You can do it on your own web-page, or submit it
to online directory or library or file archive. Then promote it in one of
numerous available ways: you add it to search engines, use banner exchange
systems, newsletters and news sites. Internet is ready to accept your ExeBook,
to promote it, to bring it to potential buyers. When they find your book and
decide to purchase it, Internet is again ready.
Online stores and software registrars and secure connections are here to help
you selling your book. All you need is ExeBook Publisher software which takes
your book you just typed in your text processor and converts it into a ready to
be sold ExeBook. You don't have to be a software developer or technical specialist to do that. The book
writer can create and start selling his ExeBook either all by himself or with
assistance of an experienced designer who will create the cover image and inside
design of his ExeBook. An Author can either submit his ExeBook and start making
money all by themselves or he can ask experienced electronic publisher to
promote and sell his ExeBook for them. ExeBook is and .exe file, reader download
it and then launch it. No special software is needed on reader's computer.
ExeBook is the book content and the book viewer in one complete package. ExeBook
view is as much close to printed book as possible. It looks just like a real
book. To turn the page you click in the corner of the page to go to previous
page you click in the other corner. It provides a scroll bar on the margin of
the page to jump quickly to any page in the book as well. The scrollbar is
invisible until you move your mouse over it. Buttons to close and minimize
ExeBook are in the same design. When reader opens ExeBook it is opened on the
same page he was reading the last time. ExeBooks do not require any
installation, the only thing the reader have to do is to download and launch the
executable of the book. Laptop users might find it useful that ExeBook can be
rotated on the screen.
ExeBook features text formatting like font styles, colors and sizes, indents,
images, hyperlinks to web or to other pages of the book. It also offers
texturized paper and semi transparent text so the texture could be visible on
the characters as in the printed book, different page size, and cover image. The
text embedded in the executable of ExeBook is all converted into images, which
makes it nearly impossible for pirates to extract it from the program. The
Bitmapped images are greatly compressed yielding smaller file size.
For example: 200 pages novel appears to be about only 450 kilobytes(this is less
than a conventional document file). Another advantage of pre-rendering of text
to bitmap is that publisher can use any fonts in his ExeBook and do not have to
worry about distributing those fonts with ExeBook.
ExeBook made the same way as
most of software sold on the net. You download it for free and can read first
pages for free until you reach the page that says "click here to buy the rest of
the book". When user clicks this link he goes whether to publisher's online store
or any other secure site and makes his ordering. The proven way to buy and sell
commercial software is providing each end user with the license code or in other
words his personal password to enable the software. ExeBook have similar
technology, but it was made easy so the reader does not have to type or even
copy/paste passwords. After online purchase of ExeBook the reader receives email
with attachment or secure web link. Reader clicks that link or attachment and
his personal license code is inserted into system registry automatically. After
another turn of the page the rest of the ExeBook becomes available. Join
innovation! Launch your book! Download ExeBook Publisher now!
Creating ExeBook
ExeBook uses it's own format for text it is so called "galleys". To be compatible with popular text processors ExeBook can import HTML files and Plain Text files converting them into galleys format. Because the industry standard for writing books is Microsoft WordT the HTML importing feature was optimized for documents exported from Microsoft WordT. First step to create your ExeBook is to launch your favorite text processor and open your book. Then export it to HTML or Plain Text. Launch ExeBook Publisher and use the Import option on the File menu.
Supported HTML features are: font styles and colors, images, links, and indentations. Also most special characters are supported. What is not currently supported: HTML tables.
If you selected a text file, you will have to specify how your text processor have separated line breaks when exported text file. Usually you left default values of those options.
ExeBook can import JPEG and BMP images. Additionally GIF images are supported, although only first frame of animated gifs will be imported.
Use the Page Setup option on the Book menu of ExeBook Publisher. Like a hard copy paper book, ExeBook can not be freely transformed. The reader can not drag the edge of the book to make it wider or bottom edge to make it higher. ExeBook on the monitor screen of the reader is always displayed exactly the same as you designed it. Width and height of the ExeBookÿ are defined in pixels. There are 6 preset formats.
XT1 340 x 450
XT2 432 x 550
XT3 520 x 650
XW1 640 x 440
XW2 800 x 560
XW3 1024 x 728
Note that tall formats look closer to paper books, but wide formats use more of the display area.
There is no recommended format, but as soon as we get enough statistics on sales of titles we will be able to say which format sells the best.
Options Design from the Book menu lets you to choose the cover picture for your book. By default there is no picture. To make one for your ExeBook create it in your image editor, resize it to be exactly as the page size of your book and save it in one of the ExeBook supported formats (jpeg, gif, bmp). Now you can select this image in ExeBook publisher as a cover image for your title.
In the same window you can define a paper texture. Choose one of distributed with ExeBook,ÿ create your own, or download from Internet. Paper texture is an image that is tiled in the background of the text. The same image formats are supported.
In addition to setting paper texture you can define a level of text transparency. The texture can be seen through the text characters. In paper books we can see this effect and it is emulated in ExeBook. Transparency is defined in percents, 0% is no transparency, 50% maximum transparency. The default value is 15%.
To create ExeBook you will have to fill the following fields available on the Book Information dialog of the Book menu.
Title, author, publisher, and edition.
For instance:
Title: The Night Wolf
Author: Stephanie Queen
Publisher: Tony Queen
Edition: 01/01/2001
All fields must present. Edition is either a number or the date of the release. More about editions is later in this book.
There is a Try Buy option on the Book menu. If you are not planning to sell your book, then enable the check box "The Book is Free" otherwise decide how many pages you wish to display users until they purchase your book. This is so called Trial Version, by default this value is 17 pages, but you can set up any other number. There is also a Edition Security Key, which is an unique key used to encrypt your book. This number is generated automatically using the random number generator. There is a button to regenerate this number, each time you create a new edition click this button to change this key. Very important that this key must be unique and be kept in secret. When your potential buyer reaches the page unavailable in trial version he sees the message on that page that replaces the text of the book which is hidden until purchase. You can define this message. It is recommended that you place a link to your site or to the online store where the buyer can place his order. The message is formatted the same way as ExeBook text itself, so you can import this message into ExeBook Publisher and then paste into the "Buy Me Message" window. When the buyer purchases the book, this message disappears.
On the Book menu there is an item Default Font. This default font is used in case you do not specify fonts in the text of the book, and which is most important this font is used to render page numbers.
When all the above is done you click Create ExeBook on the Exe menu. Choose the file name for your ExeBook. By default file name is the same as the title of your book. Note that all formatting, encryption, compression and saving can take a valuable amount of time.
To improve the look of the book you might use ExeBook Galleys Formatting Language - GAL. It is not that difficult as it might sound, actually GAL is just text with tags similar to HTML. If you have experience with HTML then using GAL will be easy and familiar to you. For instance if you want some text to appear bold in your ExeBook you enclose it in b and /b tags. Here is the list and explanations of the currently supported GAL tags.
p
left, justify, right, center
Changes current text alignment and justify settings: Examples: <center> <justify> <left> <right>
b
Bold text. Close with </b>
i
Italic text. Close with </i>
u
Underline text. Close with </u>
font
Changing font attributes. Closing tag /font resets all font parameters to the values that were active before the last font tag.
Accepted parameters:
face Selects font face name.
Example:
ÿ<font face="Arial Black">
size
Changes current font size. Example:
<font size=10>
color
Changes current font color. Color might be either a hexadecimal numeric value in RGB format or a predefined text name of the color.
Examples:
<font color=#0000FF>
<font color=red>
black, maroon, green, olive, navy, purple,
teal, gray, silver, red, lime, yellow,
blue, fuchsia, aqua, ltgray, dkgray, white
You can use all parameters in one tag:
<font face="Verdana" color=#0000FF size=12>Blue Verdana 12pt</font>
img
indent
Specify text indents. This tag requires at least one of the following parameters: left, right, first. The corresponding parameter specifies the indent value in pixels. Any parameter can be positive or negative.
This example changes all three indents:
page
Example: <page>
link
This tag adds a hyperlink to your book. Parameter url specifies the link destination. Note that unlike web browser ExeBook do not automatically underline hyperlinks, so if you want them to be underlined explicitly specify <u> and </u> tags. This is not required if you import HTML using Import command from the File menu, because those tags are added during conversion. In addition to url parameter you can specify a parameter anchor and set it to the name of one of the anchors in your book. More on anchors in the following section.
<link anchor="epilogue"> Epilogue </link>
anchor
Example:
<anchor name="epilogue">
Publishing ExeBook
The information below is only a quick introduction to a topic. Refer to our website
www.exebook.com
or other sources to get more information. Also you can email us for support.
First of all you must make your book available for download. Your future readers must be able to download your ExeBook to their personal computer or laptop. You could create your own home page on your ISP server or on the free web server. You also can upload your ExeBook on so called net drives. Another option is to use public FTP servers, or file storages.
You might want to compress your ExeBook with any archiving software, but we do not recommend this. ExeBook has all it's data already highly compressed, also it is more convenient for your future readers to deal with the executable file only. Upload your book and remember the URL to the file. You can upload your book to our server www.exebook.com, but out strategy is to leave the decision up to you, the billions of servers are available to store your ExeBook, choose the one that you find more convenient and useful for you.
Advertise
Now you have to advertise your book. Probably the best way is to submit it to libraries that have multiple users. For instance there is a section for electronic books on CNetT Download site. Use web search engines to find libraries and directories. ExeBook also provides a library on it's site, and you can list your book there. Email us if you want to. Advertising can be a complicated thing, but you can do it for free and do it yourself. Refer to our website and independent sources for more information.
Establishing sales
When readers download your ExeBook they can read first few pages for free, but if they like it and want to continue reading, they must pay for the rest of the book. Each page that is unavailable until purchase must have a link to the web page where users can purchase your book. The good question is how you get such a page. Our advise is to create online store or use one of software registrars. Some of them do not ask for installation fee, but they take share a profit with you. Usually you take 70% - 90% of the price of the unit, the rest goes to registrar. But they do a good job for their money, they accept orders and provide technical support for ordering process. To submit your unit to registrar site you usually fill some information on their site or email them, and they do the rest of job. Creating online store is same easy. Try to find any of online stores providers and refer to their manuals or email them.
Pricing
Although pricing is nothing else but just a choosing one number among many others it is actually complicated thing. The price of your book may vary from few cents and up to hundred dollars. Usually the higher is price the less are sales. But it is just a stereotype and sometimes it doesn't work. You decide what you would like better, to sell few units for ten dollars each or to sell thousand units for fifty cents per unit. When you are making your decision consider prices of other publishers, demands of public, projected popularity of your book, ask for advices of professionals.
Fighting Piracy
Copyrights and piracy is a complicated topic, you can find multiple articles on this subject on the internet. The most important for you as a book publisher is a question of your own safety. In most cases even if you do nothing to fight piracy your book will sell, but if you do something about it could sell better. Remember that the best protection of your copyright is honesty of your readers and the law. Usually piracy is either an illegal redistribution of your ExeBook, illegal distribution of your book content in other words the text of your book and illegal distribution of license codes for your ExeBook. You can fight all of those. ExeBook protects the content of your book converting it into bitmaps, encrypting it and protecting it with the password. We do not guarantee 100% protection though, because any lock and protection can be hacked if the enough amount of time and resources are given. Each title of the ExeBook is protected with the unique Edition Key which is randomly generated when you created your ExeBook. Somedayÿ crackers can find out this secret number either decrypting the content or purchasing a copy of your book legally and then distribute the key illegally. Most of people will never use stolen keys, but it is recommended that as soon as you know the fact of the Edition Key being stolen you regenerate your ExeBook executable with a newer key and replace the available for download executable on your site. This easy operation will immediately make stolen key useless. You may think it is some kind of trick, but this is a common practice in software industry. There are hundreds of so called "crack pages" they provide stolen keys, but notice that software publishers continue making new versions of their software with new keys. Sometimes a new version of software do not even offer new features, the reason for the new release is usually the fact that the key was pirated. So you do the same. That is the reason there is an Edition field on the Book Information page.
Import Text of Your Book
Set Up Page Size And Margins
Set Up Cover Image And Design Options
Fill In The Book Title And Other Information
Configure Commercial Settings
Select Default Font
Create Executable File
Making Your Book Look Better
Uploading your ExeBook to internet
Advertising your ExeBook
How to start selling
Pricing your ExeBook
Fighting piracy