Going Electronic: How Ebooks are helping bring vintage dive books back into circulation

Chris Mitchell · Issue 69, Nov/Dec 2012 · pp. 60–63

Products mentioned: Amazon Kindle, The Wrecker's Guide To South West Devon

We’re all familiar with the dramatic rise of ebooks, driven particularly by Amazon.com and their Kindle ebook reader (along with their free Kindle software for PCs, Macs and pretty much any other device). For scuba divers, the popularity of ebooks represents an interesting opportunity for more books to be published about obscure but fascinating diving topics. Few people write diving books with dreams of being the next JK Rowling, more for the love of sharing their knowledge and connecting with other people. Unfortunately diving is very much a niche subject, and it’s often hard work to sell more than a couple of thousand copies of a title due to the vagaries of distribution and promotion. This in turn used to make it a financially risky proposition for publishers to publish diving-related books because it was hard to know if the initial outlay would ever be earned back. Before ebooks, som…