Judith...It is ALWAYS a very good idea to get an ISBN unless, as Marva points out, you have a print edition in which case you can use that one. An important reason to get an ISBN is that altho Smashwords doesn't require an ISBN, you must have one to get in their Premium Catalog, which has some sales advantages. An ISBN also helps a bit to establish copyright if your work gets pirated. Further down the list is that an ISBN simply gives an impression of professionalism. Toni McConnel Author, Sing Soft, Sing Loud

Gwyn, Blio will be very nice for those who can use materials on a computer in eBook formats. However, my teaching materials are meant to be printed and used in the classroom. From what I understand, and I could be mistaken, eReadering devices and eBook software companies prevent eBooks from being printed. It would be wonderful if they did allow printing as it would open up a lot of other possibilities for readers and writers of all genres. LK

I found a couple of other sites where writers can sell their works, Sribd and DocStoc. They are both well established. Like Smashwords and Off the Bookshelf, neither provide ways to control infringement, but they look like good ways for authors and their works to get noticed. I guess there is no need to protect something that doesn't get noticed and sold. During my school's Spring Break, I contacted several sites which are supposed to help writers publish and sell "soft-copies" of their works on the Web. I'd been meaning to do this for some time. SavoirSoft was the only site that seemed to care about protecting authors' works from, as the founder put it, "digital piracy." His advice and openness was refreshing since it's hard to come by these days. SavoirSoft does offer protection of PDF and ePub books. They use a special system they developed over the last couple of years which uses intellectual property laws to license rather than sell PDF and ePub books to their readers (similar to the way iTunes Store licenses music). Anyone with a web-site selling eBooks, like those mentioned above, can use this system on their own site. The founder mentioned their site is intended to help small authors and publishers who do not have their own web-sites. I will be ready to publish my curricula and class materials once school lets out. I will revisit them at that time to see if they are still right for me. LK

@Lisa If you catch them, then you can tell them to cut it out. This is usually some site offering your book for sale to others. As far as I know, the PDFs don't have any protection to keep them from being sent to other people.

For those using Smashwords, Off the Bookshelf, and other eBook sites; do you know how they keep buyers of your electronic books from copying and giving them away to others? I'm told that people using eReaders cannot copy eBooks and give them away, but that only applies to Kindles, iPads, Nooks, etc. Am I wrong to be concerned? I really don't understand all of this technology stuff. All help is appreciated. Thank you.

Found a new one: Off the Bookshelf. Free to upload and you get a storefront. They take 80 cents plus 6% of your book price for sales. Here's my storefront and you can click on the tabs to examine the site. http://offthebookshelf.com/authors/466-marva-dasef

My book was in pdf format too. I sent it to a converter www.pdftoword.com it took a couple of days for it to come back, but it worked. If you google pdftoword you will find more converters.

I too only have PDFs of my kindergarten teaching materials and they really don't lend themselves to eReaders since they are used in the classroom. Also, I don't have any HTML skills. So a friend suggested a new site that lets me upload my materials in PDF and sell them to other teachers. Actually they "license" them to other teachers. Apparently this is supposed to protect it better than copyright, something I really don't understand anyway. The site is called Savoirsoft, and although I haven't tried them yet, their service look promising. The one thing I know for sure is that PDF and ePDF (for eReaders) can be used by all these new gadgets as well as traditional computers. It sure would be nice to have only one format to deal with.

The Kindle store was mentioned... I haven't had any luck formatting my books for uploading there. Does anybody have any tips? I have PDFs of all my books but when I looked at the previews after uploading the PDFs they looked awful. I only have very basic skills in HTML editing so I don't know what to do.

Possibly support Independent booksellers. I just looked into and joined http://www.indiebound.org/ which supports local independent book stores. Personally, I've not had much success with Indy bookstores in my area. There seems to be only one left. I gave them a book and went back to check later. The book had simply disappeared without any acknowledgment that I existed. Just so you know, Tsunami Books, which is supposed to be friendly to the independent author appears to only care if you've got MacMillan or something as a publisher. How can an INDEPENDENT store pay so little attention to a local writer? Indy authors have to fight the big publisher paradigm step-by-step.