Back when I was in college, I had a dream of publishing a book one day. In those days, the route to becoming a successful author was different. One had to find a publisher, or self-publish, utilizing a printer and marketing his or her own work. Today, the Internet provides an exciting new opportunity for authors like me to publish their own work and market it at the same time. This web page embodies at least part of the dream for me. To self-publish, and see my words in print, for all to see. The other part of the dream is to have a book to sell. And what better way to foray into this then to sell a book on how to obtain scholarships? This might be the most important issue to confront both parents and students—how to finance a college education, while Federal financial aid for students dries up.

The invention of the e-book opens up an exhilarating number of possibilities for authors. Gone are the days when an author had to rely on the publisher and the printer. Before, the author either needed to connect with a publisher who would publish their book, or they needed money, and a substantial sum of it, in order to self-publish by going through a book printer and doing their own marketing—no small achievement. Now, this is no longer necessary. Anyone who has access to the Internet and their own web page can successfully self-publish. You don't have to be rich in order to succeed!! (although it still helps, especially for the marketing side of it.) But you do need some money to become established. In my case, it took over $400.00, spent in the following manner:

Website	$134.55
ISBN numbers (10)	$225.00
Bank Account	$200.00
Monthly Charge for bank account	$6.95

It is possible to start up this sort of business initially with a little less money than that, although what you will find is that you need money to put your website on some of the biggest search engines on the Web. You can get listed on the Web, and set your web page up so that automated programs like spiders will scan your page and list them on search engines.

In 2003, over a million e-books were sold. This is a nascent industry, just getting off the ground. Whether e-books will ever get off the ground, in terms of sales, is a matter to be seen. Today, over 130 million Americans have a computer, and are hooked up to the Internet. That is a potentially large audience for e-book patrons, if the topic is right. There is now a certain comfort level to reading via the Internet; the e-book is the next logical extension. Handheld computers now exists that allow the public to read e-books in the palm of their hands. Other e-book readers are either in the works, or on the market, that allow people to read e-books in any one of several proprietary formats, including Palm Reader, and Microsoft Reader®. For some e-book software, click here. For e-book readers, click here.

This is a revolutionary time for the publishing industry. It is an exciting time for authors. Never has it been so easy to be published. Before, in order to be published, you had to own the printing press, if you couldn't get a publisher to publish you. The realization that software already existed for e-books to be created from Microsoft Word was an enormous awakening for me. At that moment, I was in the Boston Public Library, surfing the Web and trying to find out something about e-books. The idea for this business was born right then, amid the excitement that came about over the possibilities of something that has eluded many authors for many centuries. But along with the ease of being able to publish comes the challenge of keeping e-books professional looking, with the same degree of polish as their paper book counterparts.

Does this mean that the paper book is dead? No...I don't think so, if only because we are used to reading paper books, and have been for the better part of 600 years or so. This newfangled thing called an e-book is just another format for enjoying the "printed" word. Only in this case...it isn't printed. It's all a series of 1s and 0s, so arranged that, when viewed through a computer, it comes up looking like words.

©2007, Mark Murphy
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