Subject: e-Books
Do you sell any of your e-Books as a regular book not as an e-Book only?
We do not currently sell any of our e-Books as a regular print book. We do know that a number of people have printed out the e-Book (or certain parts of it) in order to read it or to use it in the gym. Digital formats allow much more flexibility for updating, instant editing, multi-media and instant delivery.
The majority of books now sold on Amazon.com, the largest book seller in the world are now e-books. We are part of the movement of converting to electronic publishing as opposed to print publishing.
We use the e-Book/digital format primarily because we can (and do) check for new rules and rule changes on a monthly basis and update the e-Book as the rules and routines change. Various USA Gymnastics committees meet on a monthly basis and it is not uncommon for them to make minor changes to two to three rules per month (especially in the lower Compulsory levels).
Occasionally, they make major rule changes or changes to the routines and if they do we can provide updated e-Books immediately. We also provide updated e-Books to customers who have purchased within the last three months if there has been a major rule or routine change.
Another reason for the e-Book format is that we include in or with the e-Book a number of spreadsheets (some of which are interactive like the Meet Scoring program), checklists, meet tracking worksheets and other similar information which can be printed out and taken to the gym and meets. We could not include and you could not use these items either at all or only with greater difficulty if we published in a normal printed book.
We also, from time to time, edit, revise and add material to our e-Books. We just added (July 2016) minor changes to the Compulsory Level e-Books. We could never revise an already printed book and printed books would and do become quickly outdated in topic areas like gymnastics.
Publishing and printing costs are high and publishers like to make big print runs to keep their costs down. Regular publishers might not publish many of our books because there are not enough potential gymnastics customers. We feel the book topics are important and we can accept the fact that the market is small because it is an important market to us.
We also regularly add content to our books as we think of new things or go through our pages and pages of notes and research from the last twenty-five years.
e-Books are also less expensive to ship to our customers , especially overseas. E-Books allow us to save our customers money on shipping, packaging and handling charges. We also think smaller packages get delivered sooner than larger packages.
There are other reasons but we hope this explains why we use the e-Book format instead of a regular printed book. It really provides us with and allows us the maximum amount of flexibility and control over what we write and allows us to constantly upgrade our product.
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