We feel your pain on shipping to Canada. When we first started the riflesandrecipes website a decade ago, mailing a book to Canada was almost as cheap as mailing it in the U.S., but it now costs almost 10 times as much to mail a book to Canada as it does inside the U.S. In fact, we have several Canadian customers who live fairly close to the border who rent post-office boxes in the U.S., just so they can get stuff they order from U.S. companies without paying an arm and a leg.
But there are several problems with e-printing. One for us is that it tends to garble data--and data is a major part of our publishing, whether handloads or recipes.
The other problems are how to keep it from being pirated, and how to make any money. The last is part of the reason e-books have dropped considerably in popularity over the past three years, when they once looked like the future of publishing: Major book publishers must actually charge pretty close to their prices for new printed books to make e-books worthwhile.
At the same time, many readers started going back to paper books. Surveys have found most of these report "screen burn-out." Much of their day is spent on computers or their smart-phone, and when they get home and want to read something, they're tired of looking at screens.
This may be even more true of hunting/shooting writing. I had an interesting talk with the owner of a major hunting/shooting publishing company at the Safari Club Convention last month. He started e-printing several books a few years ago, when it started to become a hot deal, and reports sales have dropped--and even at their peak, revenues from his e-books were never more than a tiny percentage of his company's profit.
We've had e-printing books on our radar for several years now, but haven't done it for all of the above reasons, plus the fact that the number of our readers who've requested e-books can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Our own small venture into e-publishing, our quarterly "magazine" RIFLE LOONY NEWS, has never grown much since we started it almost a decade ago, despite only costing $8 a year. We sold more copies of GUN GACK in its the first month than we have RLN subscribers, which indicates our readers prefer paper.
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” John Steinbeck
