Showing posts with label e-books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-books. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Free & Easy: How to create book cover from program PAINT.NET

PAINT.NET is a open source program for the making and editing images. 

 PAINT.NET is a program that is very easy to use. It is suitable for people who do not know much about technique, however, certain features may not be paying any other equivalent program such as Photoshop. You can download the program for free without copyright issues. Downloaded by visiting the web PAINT.NET.

After downloading the program and open the program. You will see as below.















1. The work area is the area of image that we are working with. You can resized it by the command. Image-> Resize 

2. Colors is the tab that you can choose or change color of working area. 

3. Layers of the image

 4. Tools are set for customization. We can use a mouse click Tool, and then move the mouse into one zone to compose the image.

Then, set the size of the cover. Go to the command Image-> Resize if the book cover is A5 size. You should set image size to 52.92 cm to 75.45 cm. This size will be large enough to be a book cover.


Then we have a work space as a proportion of the A5.



Now you are ready to creating a book cover image. The first thing, you should have a background pictures. After that, open the image that you want to put on the book cover by choosing File-> Open  and select your image and then click OK.

 
Then cut a specific area using the Rectangle Select tool, as shown below. [For this example, I want to use only the picture of the girl on the left.]


Then copy and paste the image into the working area, which is the cover that was created earlier, after that Paste in new layer.



Girl image will be placed in the working space as show below. 


 Add the name of book by adding New Layer.


Then click Tools, and choose T [Tools for creating characters]. Choose font type from the menu. Then type in the title of your book.



Above,  You can be seen that, we have 2 Layers of characters [or words] in order to have a different color for each line of text. You can select individual Layers and move it to make a book cover more beautifully by clicking Move Selected Pixels photo tool as shown below. 



Then insert more pictures or other texts, wording for making it more beautiful. 





Then save the image file by clicking File -> "Save As" and type the picture name, choose .png image. Finally, Your book cover is done.

Note: Images source - freepik.com

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Thailand e-books market : players





Thailand book's market was change a lot in 2014-2015. E-book is one of the main reason. I have been a writer for 15 years. At the first year that I published my first novel,the e-book market was not enable in Thailand. All writers sent their typescript to editors and wait for 3-6 months before editors accepted or rejected their stories.

During the past several years, technological change has an effect for world book industry. A lot of books are sell online and become an e-books. For the world market, there are many online bookstores which sell e-books such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play etc .

In 2015, there were more than 300 traditional publishers in Thailand, The market value of  book industry was expected to be worth 24,600-25,000 million baht and 5% annual growth rate. The top three bestselling are Fiction, Children books and Study/exam books.

Thailand’s books market is a very small  comparing with GDP (whole country's population income). It is only 0.2% of GDP.
In 2014-2015, Thailand e-book market was estimated as 1-2% of Thailand’s book market or 400-600 million baht. In the other hand, market growth rate is larger than traditional market growth rate. Market drivers are growth rate of tablet and mobile users, new self-published writers and lower price comparing with original or traditional books.


Thailand e-book market will grow to 6,000 baht in next 5 years. There are e-book publishers/operators in Thailand as follows;

Mobile E-Book  http://mebmarket.com
OokBee  http://ookbee.com / aisbookstore.com
Hytexts http://www.hytexts.com
4Dbook&Sanook,com
Ebooks.in.th
2ebook.com






Most of them are not traditional publishers which expand their market to e-books but they are IT or technology companies which change their business model to e-books.

For traditional publishers, they are just followers in the e-books market as follows;

asiabooks.com
se-ed.com
naiin.com
b2s.com


Source :
http://www.pubat.or.th/index/pages/News%20Feed/8b12843da2ab49feb9ccb1e6e3ea067f
http://marketeer.co.th/archives/49809

[November,2016]