Kindle vs Paperback

I ordered my own Complete the Art of Investing myself yesterday.

The $10 Kindle vs. the $25 paperback.
The royalties to me are about the same (about $7). So far most of my sales are Kindle version. The paperback version has the full version from Book 1 to Book 7 and it also includes the important articles from then on. It is not economically and technically feasible to print and bind over 800 pages. Amazon has a match box feature that basically you get my Kindle version free when you buy the printed copy from Amazon.

The original format of the book is based on the printed copy. Hence the format in the Kindle may not be always right. It is hard to fix them even now I've  separated them into two versions. The Kindle version deals with different screen formats and all Kindle readers are not the same.

Another advantage of the Kindle version is you can jump to a referenced link to a web page and/or a book location. I used to have 50 and 50 for the two formats. Now, the Kindle version is winning.

The 70% royalty  is generous to the authors for Kindle books. I have a lot of sales from buyers browsing Amazon's site. If I have 100 sales a month, it would be too time-consuming to handle all the orders. With Amazon, I do nothing. In addition, Amazon provides all the tools to build a book. For some books that I can derive from the Complete The Art of Investing, it takes me about two hours or less to publish a book without counting the waiting time from Amazon.

There will be no major books for a long while. I have to go back full time to investing. The income from book sales is not much. It is still fine for me as I benefit a lot in writing these investing books. Time to be a reader and be disciplined to follow what I preach. Now, the shoe maker can have time to make shoes for his own children.

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If you have not used the Kindle reader, try it out. There are many free books for samples.

If you have some difficulties in using it, here are some hints.

Most graphs and tables are in landscape orientation (recommended for small screens) for both paperback and e-readers. Some graphs may not be displayed adequately on a small screen of an e-reader. E-readers may be available in the current version of Windows, so you can read e-books on the larger screen of your PC. For better orientation, just flip the e-readers 90 degrees. Some reader lets you select a table or a graph to display it to fit the screen.

A link is usually included for the most screens. Copy it to your browser to display the graphs on your PC if desirable. Instructions on how to produce some graphs are provided as you should try them out. One example is how to produce a chart on detecting market crashes.

The font size (Ctrl Minus for browser implementation of e-readers) and line spacing of most e-book formats can be adjusted. The unknown, special character is the “smiling face” that the current Kindle does not convert correctly as of this writing.