A lot of us with backlist books are now putting them back into circulation through self-published ebooks. I doubt anyone's making a fortune out of this. But it seems to make more sense to have books in circulation legitimately, at low e-prices, than to leave sales to second hand markets and the pirates.

I've only got round to putting up one back list title so far, <a title="Epiphany" href="http://davidhewson.com/standalones/epiphany/"><em>Epiphany</em>,</a> now available for 99p. When time becomes available I will try to get more online. It is a time-consuming process, though. And all of us involved in this kind of activity do need to issue a kind of caveat to existing readers: these are works we wrote some time ago. Like most people in this position, my writing's changed over the years. Early work is rarely indicative of later work. So expect to be surprised by a change in tone and style. And if you really feel you've wasted your 99p or whatever you can always return it to Amazon for a refund.

<!--more-->What I don't have planned at the moment is any move to extend this process beyond Kindle. One reason for this is, <a title="From Scrivener to Kindle step-by-step" href="http://davidhewson.com/2011/03/from-scrivener-to-kindle-step-by-step/">as I hope I showed in yesterday's post,</a> it is extremely easy to get things online with Amazon's ebook service. Everywhere else is, if you want to charge even a modest sum for your work, much more demanding.

I'm thinking in particular of Apple's iBooks here. I have iBooks on my iPad. It's OK but as a reader I much prefer Kindle. Unlike iBooks it runs on a variety of platforms, from Macs to PCs and Android devices. iBooks is designed for Apple alone. I've no idea how popular it is but as an author publishing medium it poses one significant problem: you have to get yourself an ISBN number for your work.

Given that my backlist may one day extend to five or six works