eBooks.com Launched

With Australia's best selling author and arguably the most attractive Web site address in the industry, eBooks.com launched today after three long years of preparation behind the scenes.

Best-selling author Bryce Courtney officially launched the site with an exclusive to eBooks.com novella that tells the story of a group of Vietnam veterans, an ex-Viet Cong and a determined woman that fight for justice by running a remarkable dope scam among the rich and powerful. "Meeting at the Smokey Joe Cafe" retails for US $5.00 and is available from the eBooks.com Web site.

eBooks.com Official Launch
Stephen Cole (left) and best-selling author Bryce Courtenay
(right) launch eBooks.com and the exclusive e-novella "Meeting
at the Smokey Joe Cafe"

eBooks.com has opened its doors with a modest, high quality list of business and general reference works ready for immediate purchase and download. The release also includes the unveiling of ePacks for customising content. A long list of publishers are represented, including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Penguin Australia and McGraw-Hill.

At this stage the ebooks are being sold in Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) exclusively and require readers to have Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.05 installed. eBooks.com's Managing Director Stephen Cole told Planet eBook earlier this week that, "[eBooks.com] aim to become the pre-eminent destination site for anyone looking for an ebook. To that end, we are entering partnerships with book publishers and the owners of other ebook repositories, with a view to having a catalogue of 30,000 commercial titles by mid February 2001."

Although an Australian-based company, Cole believes that eBooks.com is well placed to be a central player in the emerging ebook industry.

ePacks

One of the exciting, groundbreaking technologies being used is the company's 'ePack' service. eBooks.com describes the feature as follows: "An ePack is a bundle of selected pages from one or more different eBooks. You can cut pieces from many books and pack them into a single digital anthology."

The feature is not appropriate for all content (like novels) but, for the majority of the ebooks at eBooks.com (like business, technical and general reference works), it shows clearly how selling ebooks can benefit readers. This kind of 'custom' publishing functionality places the sort of control in the hands of the reader that is not possible when buying paper books.

What this means of course is that you can purchase only the content you want -- you can select by page ranges and sections or both. From there the creator is able to pass on the ID of the ePack meaning friends, colleagues or students can go to eBooks.com and purchase the exact same content.