In a recent entry over at Speculations, an author posted his eBook sales. By far, he made far more money with the DNAML format than any other.

I researched this. DNAML makes an authoring system that makes a very pretty book reading browser plug-in. I am not a big fan of browser plug-ins and I have many problems with the Adobe Acrobat PDF reader. I prefer to have online stories and books presented as pure HTML.

There are several reasons for the success of DNAML. One is that it supports DRM (Digital Rights Management). Normally, I would say the DRM is the enemy. I don’t like copy protection on anything. DRM reduces the value of anything that it touches, but it seems that many sites that sell books online are using DNAML with DRM. This protects the files from being copied after someone buys them. It is annoying for the buyer, but protects the author and the seller. DRM has been shown to reduce sales of music. Of course, DNAML can be configured to not use DRM.

Another reason that DNAML is successful is that there are a number of sites selling books that use it. They may have chosen DNAML because of the DRM, but don’t use it. The plug-in makes book reading very easy and the authoring software seems easy to use (I am downloading the free “try-it” version). The bad thing is that you have to buy the authoring software.

Anyone considering selling PDFs online might consider the DNAML format. It is smaller and faster than the incredibly bloated Adobe PDF plug-in. It works just fine in FireFox.

You should go to ebook.com (ShareWareeBooks.com) and try reading a book. The first time you try it will ask to install the browser plug-in, but that takes just seconds. You can see how nice the interface is. You can use the ebook site to sell your books, as well as hundreds of others that I found with a quick quick google search for “Science Fiction DNL”.

I will try to create an eBook and post it here so you can try it out.

Update: I tried the trial software. It limits you to 2 pages. Two pages are not enough to evaluate it. I wanted to produce a short story and publish it. I tried to do a text flow of a story and it locked the application. I had to use ctrl-alt-del to bring up the task manager and close the software.

It seemed like such a good idea before I discovered the stupid trial limit and the nasty bugs. Stay away from this. It was a waste of time. I’ve already uninstalled it. I expect that I will be getting spam from them, now.