The Value of eBooks

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I like to read. I also like to do some research before I get started on new tasks. These two things have led me to have a rather large collection of eBooks on my computer that I have read through and have gotten different amounts of value from. You might remember me mentioning one in particular recently, Jonathan Volk’s new guide.

Being on the Internet and in the affiliate marketing space you see a lot of different people promoting eBooks on various topics – Social Media, Ad Words, Ad Sense, Blogging, SEO, PPC, PPV and on and on. Anything that people are using to make money, or develop blogs, or interact with people on the web, there is an eBook for it. That got me thinking, how valuable are eBooks and if you have to pay for them, are they worth the investment?

After collecting a good sampling of eBooks over the past 6-8 months and going through them all, each has their own style and each provided a different amount of value to me. I’m just going to go over my general findings here and you should remember that something that didn’t make sense or resonate with me doesn’t make it a bad product; your mileage may vary.

One of the main things that I found through reading all these eBooks is that the less I knew about a given subject, the more valuable the product often was. A majority of eBooks are given away for free or as a bonus for signing up for an email list and so the cost of acquisition to the user is minimal. Likewise, with the guides given away for free oftentimes they are focused more on the beginner or newbie. That’s great if you want a lot of that type of info. A good example of this is an eBook I read on PPV awhile ago. I had never done PPV, had only heard a little about it and didn’t know many of the networks that had that type of traffic, let alone strategies for making good PPV campaigns. I found even the most basic info about PPV informative and helpful, since my knowledge base was so low.

Alternatively, I was reading through an extensive eBook on blogging and most of the information (like registering a domain, setting up a wordpress account and adding pictures to posts) were things I already knew a lot about. I didn’t get nothing out of reading through this, as I found out about some cool plugins I wanted to check out and got some good info on building a mailing list, but on the whole got less out of it due to my higher knowledge base in that area.

Length, and along with that cost, are two other things I wanted to touch on. For me, I prefer reading through shorter eBooks that get right to the heart of the matter at hand. No need to build me into it with the story of the development of a blog, or how internet marketing has evolved over the years up to now. Focus is key. As you can probably imagine, the longer the eBook, the more it likely costs. Many free eBooks are 20-60 pages or so while the ones that you’ll see for $37, $47, or $97 are much longer and more in-depth. Being more in-depth doesn’t make it them automatically better though. I’ve got several 200+ page eBooks that are both very in-depth; one is excellent and gave me a lot of great info, walk-throughs and provoked a lot of thought while the other was mostly filler and repetition.

I think an eBook done right has a lot of value to any consumer and will continue to collect eBooks on topics of interest to me. In general, I get the most out of eBooks that are shorter, more to the point and are in areas that I have less knowledge on. Additionally, anytime an eBook provokes thought, gives you take-away tasks or sparks a great idea is a good product in my eyes (A great example, The 31 Days to a Better Blog Workbook from Darren Rowse).

What are your thoughts on eBooks? Do you find them useful? Do you only read free ones, or will you pay for the right product? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!