Well, it’s been a long, slow road, but the end is finally in sight. My new book on leadership and management in American business is now available on Kindle. Nice timing, since Amazon just released a whole new crop of Kindles, including the Kindle Fire.

Click here to go to the Kindle version of my book on Amazon.com.

Interestingly, the Kindle version of my book will actually be the cheapest version. It’s priced at only $7.99. I priced it slightly lower than the iPad version because I just did not think the experience of reading my book on the Kindle was as good as reading it on an iOS device. You get no benefit from my formatting efforts on the Kindle. Just plain text. You get the same info, but not the same experience. So I decided to give Kindle readers a discount.

I have to say that, even though publishing your own book on the surface seems pretty easy these days, actually getting it in the hands of the vast majority of consumers is still not the cinch that it is described to be. Multiple formats. Completely different, cryptic rules. Non-existent or buggy and unreliable tools. No human help whatsoever. These are just some of the roadblocks set in front of the budding self-publisher. And I have to admit, it’s not a lot of fun to pour your time, effort, money, and sweat into making your book’s format “just right”, only to have to trash it all when you reformat it for yet another platform. Frustrating, and more, inefficient. But them’s the rules. At least for now.

What we really need is a universal format for ebooks. Wait, we already have one! It’s called PDF. If you embed the fonts inside a PDF of your book, that is all you should need to publish your book on any platform. But that is not our reality today. Every platform has their own special requirements and wants things in their own special formats. Some platforms (Kindle) actually say they will take a PDF of your book. But what they actually do is convert your carefully-formatted PDF into the same format-stripped Kindle version as everyone else uses.

So if you want to get my book at the absolute cheapest price you can go over to the Kindle store and pick up the Kindle version of my book. Heck go ahead and download the free Kindle reader for iPad and then you can read the Kindle version on your iPad and save a couple of bucks! But in my opinion, that’s sort of like watching an episode of I Love Lucy on your 55-inch HD flatscreen. You can do it… but why would you? In any case, you’re call!

Tom