Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Providing E-Books

One common way to capture and present an information product is in an electronic book, or e-book. Unlike a physical book you hold in your hands, an e-book is simply an electronic version of a book that you read on a computer screen, a specialized reader device (Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony e-Reader), or your favorite mobile device (iPad, tablet computer, smartphone, iPod Touch). Because the content of an e-book is stored in an electronic file, you have several options for storing it.

The great thing about an e-book is that you, as the creator, can choose a style for setting it up:

• Use chapters such as the ones you find in a physical book, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
• Style your e-book as an academic term paper composed of page after page of prose, with examples, figures, and appendices.
• Use a long table with rows and columns of information in a directory-style format.

As you put together an e-book, its structure depends on the information you're presenting. Some e-books read like miniature books, with their own tables of contents, indexes, and chapter headings, like the management review e-book shown in Figure 3-2. If your e-book is long, consider breaking the content into clear, easy to-find headings. If your e-book is shorter than a typical chapter, an introductory paragraph is usually sufficient to explain its flow and structure.

Creating the document

Because most people use computer programs such as Microsoft Word to write their documents, ...