So e-books are taking over the world. Depending on who you ask, that’s either a good thing (readers who travel) or a very bad thing (publishers). Either way, the genie is out of the bottle for good. The big challenge is how to tap into the gift market.

If I purchase a p-book (you know, the traditional paper kind), I can read it myself, lend it to others, or give it away. There’s a lot of value in all three of those options. When I purchase an e-book, leaving aside the problem of being trapped on one type of e-reader, I can mainly just read it myself. That’s pretty limiting to the expansion of the market.

Barnes and Noble have tackled the lending issue with the Nook, which lets you lend an e-book to another Nook owner. While the book is out on loan, you get locked out of reading it yourself. But the loan feature has some major flaws, including the fact that you can only lend an e-book title once and there’s a two-week limit to the loan period. Who reads a loaned book in 2 weeks?

So far, no one has created a legal way for the general public to give e-books as gifts. There are ways to cheat to provide free copies to your friends, but that certainly isn’t happy news for either authors or publishers.

The illicit trading of music files is one of the ways that MP3s permanently transformed the music industry. In response, Apple started iTunes and legitimized the buying of music in single tracks. Now a whole “good” portion of the population is comfortable buying music online. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t solved the issue of giving music as a gift, other than offering the ubiquitous gift card. E-books suffer the same fate.

Trouble is, gift cards don’t create emotional connections to a personally selected item, like a particular book can. With books being a popular gift (and my favorite), this is a big issue to solve. Wish I knew how to crack this one. I’d be sitting pretty on the royalties.

Barnes & Noble just announced they are creating a distribution platform for independent authors to sell self-published books on the B&N website –- e-books only.

Smashwords allows anyone who can create a MS Word document to self-publish and distribute on nine platforms including Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple, and the Smashwords site itself — e-books only.

Of course, Amazon has offered e-book distribution through the Kindle for what seems likes ages now.

So there are many ways to sell and distribute an independent book as long as it’s an e-book.

But if you want to sell a p-book –- that’s a traditional paper book — as a true self-publisher, you have limited options: your own website and Amazon. That’s about it.  Only Amazon offers a program to allow easy sales and distribution of paper books, books that still make up at least 95% of all book sales.

The Amazon program is pretty simple. For $29.95 USD per year, you can have a seller’s account on Amazon.com and your book is listed in their search engines. They won’t keep many copies in stock, so your sales need to drive their purchase orders. But they guarantee you 45% of the retail price of your book. Not great, but manageable. When you start to sell in volume (i.e., you’re shipping them cases of books rather than one or two books at a time), it starts to pay off. They pay you each month with a direct deposit to your bank account. Plus they are the largest e-tailer in the world, so there is value in the exposure you get.

Oddly, as everyone rushes to compete in the emerging digital market, they are leaving Amazon to its monopoly on p-books for the self-publisher. No one wants to challenge the mighty Amazon? Really?

Canada Post has recently announced upcoming mail classification changes that will make it twice as expensive for publishers and media sellers to ship books, CDs and DVDs.

Effective January 1, 2009, the oversize letter mail category will split into two categories: Regular and Irregular items.

The Irregular category is to include any envelope that is:

• 1-2 cm thick
• Rigid
• And/or that has box-like edges

By these definitions, any envelopes containing CDs, DVDs, or slim books—whether soft cover or hard cover—would be charged at new Irregular rates, which are to be twice the rates of Regular oversized letter mail. For example, a 150g Irregular package will cost $3.92 to mail versus $1.96 for a Regular package.

Canada Post also snuck into a “background document” the announcement that Irregular letter mail items will be transitioned to Parcel rates over the next three years. With current book-sized parcels averaging a cost of $8 to $11 to ship within the country, Canadian media publishers can expect huge cost jumps to mail their items in the next few years.

Publishers whose books already ship at Parcel rates (those over 500g or thicker than 2cm) are not affected by the new rules.