Being in the business of information products I get to see and read many ebooks.

It’s now pretty much accepted that PDF is the standard in delivering ebooks. The .exe format (ebook compilers) showed quite a bit of early promise but has literally fizzled out of favor.

It’s all about PDF today. Knowing that, one must now move to master it and offer their customers the best user experience possible.

Now I must say that the vast majority of ebooks I get to see (and I mean close to 80%) are of poor quality. The design values are shockingly poor to put it bluntly.

It’s strange because the promise is good, the sales pitch hits the mark, the title works … and then when you get your hands on it, well … it’s a scrappy Word document.

Now you might say it’s not the design that counts, it’s the content. True.

But if you want to be a true professional information entrepreneur that continually sells to the same customer for years to come (repeat sales) you must give them some nice eye candy.

What web 2.0 has given us is clean, beautiful user interfaces and designs with soft colors and rounded corners. It’s a pleasure on the eyes, those very same eyes that look at the monitor hour after hour.

By taking the time to develop a user-friendly ebook, you are telling a reader that you are not just in it for the quick buck - you actually value their reading experience.

I’ll be running a weekly feature on eBook Design that will be available every Monday from next week. So far, I have slotted 45 topics for this series.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Which brings me to one eBook (a free one at that) that caught me as being truly professional in its design … ie: it was an absolute pleasure to read.

And that was Seth Godin’s The Bootstrappers’ Bible. It’s published very professionally by ChangeThis who enhances the pdf reading experience even further.

Aside from reading Seth’s unique style and offerings just take a close look at how they present the ebook, which I’ll discuss next Monday in a case study.