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The world is embracing the ebook at an astonishing pace. Most of us who write for a living welcome this. It means new opportunities for authors and readers alike. It means you can carry lots of books in a single, light device. With some systems you can do clever things such as sharing comments and even lending books to your friends.

Everyone who works in publishing -- as writers, editors, designers, in sales and marketing -- wants you to make the most of that new gadget, and to understand how it fits into the world of books. So this is an attempt to set down a few facts about this fast-changing medium.

<strong>Price</strong>

Ebook prices have been in flux, mainly due to the speed at which ereaders have taken off. There was a time when ebooks were sometimes more expensive than their print equivalent. This rarely happens now. If you look on Amazon you'll usually find they are slightly lower in price than the print book. Prices still usually follow the cycle of paper publishing. So the original ebook price will be based on the hardback cost, and will fall when the paperback comes out. To use my own work as an example, my current hardback, <em>The Fallen Angel,</em> costs £7.99 at Amazon UK and £7.19 for the Kindle edition. My current paperback, <em>The Blue Demon, </em>lists at £4.19 while the paperback is £3.98. So you save money and get the added convenience of the ebook, but don't, of course, have that nice book to put on the shelf. The choice is yours.

<strong>Having a look before you buy</strong>

You don't need to commit to an ebook before buying it. In fact you can read a substantial amount of it for free, much more than you'd get by flicking through a paper book in a shop. All main ebook systems come with a sample function. If you're uncertain, use it -- you may be surprised how big a chunk of the book you get (I know I was).

<strong>Free out of print books</strong>

Books have a limited copyright life, one determined by different sets of laws around the world. Lots of well-known works are now out of copyright. So you can download editions of Shakespeare, Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and many other authors for nothing. A great site to find these authors is <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page" target="_blank">Project Gutenberg</a> which has been digitising out of print books for some time. You will also find inexpensive editions of classic books on Amazon and other stores. Often these are based on Gutenberg texts so you may want to use the original for free.

<strong>Unauthorised editions</strong>

The music industry was devastated by the proliferation of piracy of MP3 files shared freely across the internet. There are similar fears that the book business will be impacted in the same way by the growing amount of stolen copyright modern books now being placed online, often as money-making ventures for the criminals behind this trade. If you're thinking of getting some 'free' books this way please think again. People who love books don't steal them, because they know that in the end that practice will damage the livelihoods of people working in publishing, and their continuing ability to be able to afford to write. You could also find yourself the victim of fraud and theft too.

Here are some fallacies about ebook theft you may encounter.

<em>It's not really stealing.</em>

Book thieves try to justify this in many different ways. They call themselves 'pirates' or 'file sharers'. They will say, 'But I wouldn't have bought the book if I had to pay for it.' Or, 'If I like the book I got for free it makes it more likely I'll tell my friends and buy the next one.' Don't fall for these excuses. People who rip off ebooks are taking something of value without paying for it. That's theft.

<em>It's not a big problem</em>

Almost every commercial ebook now published is available in ripped-off form, and many popular audiobooks. <a title="Another insight into how book thieves work" href="http://davidhewson.com/2011/02/another-insight-into-how-book-thieves-work/">One 'file sharing' site alone</a> has more than 300,000 registered users, who frequently share stolen books among each other and give themselves 'rewards' for new titles.

<em>Authors don't need the money anyway.</em>

Some of us don't. But most authors don't earn much at all. For many writing is a second job while something else pays the bills. Book theft deprives them and the employees of their publishing house of income at a time when earnings are falling throughout the media.

<em>If you just made the books cheaper I'd buy instead of stealing.</em>

How cheap does a book have to be? As we've already said, ebooks are, in most instances, cheaper than their paper equivalent. In many large markets book prices have fallen considerably over the last decade. A mainstream ebook can now be had for £3 to £4 in the UK, which is cheaper than an equivalent book cost twenty years ago.

<em>If you object to book piracy you should also object to libraries and second hand book sales.</em>

Libraries buy books, and in many countries pay a public lending right to authors, a small sum based on the number of times a title is lent. Second hand book sales are of one copy alone. Digital books can be 'duplicated' a million times at no cost. A second hand sale on eBay is not the same as uploading a file to a torrent site that serves hundreds of thousands of users.