Heritage Ebooks — the first fortnight
November 8th, 2011
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Heritage Ebooks, for those who don’t know, is the digital publishing arm of VisConPro Ltd, the holding company of fotoLibra. So we’re sister companies: same owners, same shareholders, same staff.
We set up Heritage Ebooks to demonstrate the advanceImages system for supplying images to ebook publishers, and it’s already taken on a life of its own. I will be blogging extensively about advanceImages next month.
Heritage Ebooks’ first 40 titles are the Follies of England series, over a quarter of a million words written by me and Dutch art historian Wim Meulenkamp, and with a large percentage of the 1,900+ photographs taken by fotoLibra members. You can see our first titles here at heritage.co.uk — click on VIEW ALL TITLES.
Although we’re not awash with critical acclaim — nobody has yet reviewed a single title — there has been media interest. I was on BBC Radio 4′s flagship programme Today on Monday 31 October, talking about follies.
Today the Daily Mail ran a good, big feature on the amazing follies of Whitaker Wright, with a credit to Heritage Ebooks at the end. You can read it here.
All this, as our PR says, is grist to the mill. fotoLibra members are being paid a royalty on the sale of these books, so the more books we sell, the more they will earn. And ebooks never go out of print. So the money will keep coming in. More publicity means more sales. To date we’ve sold 99. Harry Potter this isn’t.
But it’s a start.
Hello Gwyn,
Best of luck in your efforts. Would be curious to know how you’re costing Ebooks usage. Seems to be a complicated issue which other contributors would also like to know. Please keep up the emails, they educate all of your contributors.
Kind Regards, Ottmar
These photo ebooks are interesting. So with the formats epub and mobi I can view them on a Android cellphone, the iPad, the Nook Color or in the Kindle Reader application. Providing the download on your own server you don’t have to pay royalties to an app shop.
Hello Gwyn, I like the idea of Ebooks, the latest trend is for electronic books and not paper, so this should take off, hopefully very well, also I read the article in the Daily Mail, and hope the byline at the end giving the web site for Heritage books will entice people to look at them [and buy], all the best in this enterprise.
Best regards
John Austin
Great stuff Gwyn,
I read the good D M article today and was pleased to see that you were also in our local paper the Surrey Advertiser last weekend.
Best of luck with the venture
Mike
Nice to see your new collection of heritage ebooks?
Why the question mark, why follies, they are a rich man’s indulgence, not real proud GB world heritage stuff.
Your ebooks are old fashioned printed format.
In my mind a true ebook is electronic, knowledge at the speed of light. Downloadable true ebooks, available on every platform from smartphone to iPad. Please see my easyview ebooks at: http://landscape-guides.co.uk/easyview2.asp
Great coverage in the DM, Gwyn, congratulations. DM has pretty big readership in the US so I hope you see a spike in sales here, too.
Great, too, that your eBooks can be read in different formats that many of us already have. (If I could just get the iPad out of Mike’s hands once in a while.)
verry nice،good
This is a good idea.
Hello Gwyn, Have read the article in the Daily Mail as they all publicity is good, let us hope that your hard work brings a good reward,Best wishes, Mike
Thanks Mike and everyone, let’s hope people carry on buying some of the ebooks as a result!
Gwyn,
Remember your comment last year? about remote controls, I wonder if there is any mileage in other projects and ebooks? maybe you have found a niche we can look into with weird, or wonderful things?
Just airing some thoughts….
Martyn