A key element in the online business efforts of many Internet marketers is e-book sales. The large majority of online marketers – either in the capacity of an affiliate or an author – will have sold, or perhaps given away (possibly as a bonus) e-books at some point in time.

Today, the vast majority of e-books are distributed in PDF format suitable for the widely used Adobe Acrobat reader. Almost everyone has a copy of Acrobat on their PC, so this makes a lot of sense. In the unlikely event that someone does not have this program, they can download a copy free of charge from the Adobe website.

Publishing your e-book, whether you have written it yourself or have bought PLR rights, is pretty simple. There are any number of programs which will produce a PDF file for you. All you have to do then is market it. Putting it on Clickbank is a fairly popular option.

However, there are other options available and at least one of these is very new. The Amazon Kindle reader is a pretty hot gadget right now. It is, very definitely, a nice piece of kit. The fact that virtually every new e-book reader released which shows the slightest promise is instantly christened the “Kindle killer” only serves to confirm that Amazon’s Kindle is not only the market leader, but is the standard against which all other e-book readers are measured. The key ting to note. from the point of view of an Internet marketer, is that more people have Kindle readers than any other type.

Aside from the hardware, one of the important influencing factors in the Kindle’s success to date has definitely been the huge number of Kindle books which are available on the Amazon website for readers to choose from. At the moment there are more than 420,000 Kindle books to pick from. This number is being added to at an average rate of approximately 500 new titles daily. So, as interesting as that undoubtedly is, what does it have to do with Internet marketing?

Well, putting it simply, as well as being a new way of reading, the Kindle also makes new methods of publishing available. Anyone with an Amazon account can publish their own Kindle e-book. It’s as easy as saving a Word document in HTML format and uploading it to the Amazon website. Within a matter of minutes (it really is that easy) you could have your e-book showcased by the largest bookseller in the world!

You can set the price of your e-book at whatever you wish. However, if you choose a price between $0.99 and $9.99, you will retain 70% of the sales price for any books sold. There is a small deduction to cover delivery charges. This is based upon the size of the book in kilobytes and is usually no more than a few cents. Whilst this may be less than you might expect to make were you to sell a $97 e-book, the potential to achieve a large sales volume, coupled with the fact that the process is entirely free, may make it a profitable option for you.

It’s also worth considering that the Kindle may be the future of both books and e-books as well. It’s an ideal opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor with what could very well turn out to be a totally new development in e-book marketing. So, maybe you should think about producing a Kindle edition of the next e-book!

Making money with the Amazon Kindle is easy – publish a Kindle edition of your next e-book – you could even sell Kindle accessories as an affiliate.

Online retail giant, Amazon, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and the original Amazon website launched in 1995. Today Amazon is an extremely successful business and one of the best recognised and most trusted brands on the planet. It’s easy to forget what an unusual concept ordering books online and having them shipped by mail was at the time. There were plenty investors and business analysts who predicted that Amazon would have a difficult time of it – and indeed it took until the end of 2001 before Amazon were able to report their first profit.

Having changed the way that many people bought books, Amazon diversified into other areas very quickly. Audio CDs, video, consumer electronics, computer software and toys were all additions to Amazon’s portfolio. Today you can buy almost any consumer item that you can think of from Amazon – including your groceries.

In addition to growing their product range, Amazon set up further websites in the UK, France, Germany, China and Canada. Nevertheless, they maintained their original passion for books and they still had, in the eyes of the public, a very strong link with book sales.

This strong link with books would serve them well in November 2007 when they launched the original Kindle e-book reader. Having already changed the method of buying books, Amazon was now altering the way that the books were read. The Kindle attracted a great deal of publicity and it’s reasonable to suggest that the e-book reader market took off exponentially when Amazon released their updated and enhanced Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009.

Amazon followed up with the large display Kindle DX reader in June of the same year. This boasted a bigger e-ink technology display screen and was targeted at readers of newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, a lot of the publicity surrounding the DX was produced from the world of academic publishing – a sector often thought of as a little conservative, not to say staid.

So, the way in which books are purchased, delivered and even read have all been fundamentally changed in a fairly short period of time. The final piece of the jigsaw – publishing – is also likely to evolve in the near future. Large publishing houses will certainly want to produce an e-book version of any new publications in future. The traditional process of hardback release followed by the paperback edition a few months later will be modified by the inclusion of an e-book edition right at the front end of the cycle.

Since publishing e-books is less costly than either hardback or paperback release publishing houses may be encouraged to be more daring in future. It may well mean that a greater number of new authors are published due to the fact that the process is cheaper and therefore involves less financial risk. It could prompt more authors to take greater control by self publishing. In fact, publishing Kindle books is, even now, an achievable goal for anyone who has an Amazon account and who can operate simple word processing software such as Microsoft Word. E-book readers are a true revolution in both reading and publishing.

Discover the Amazon Kindle and see the full range of Kindle accessories available to help you customise and protect your reader.