With the election a little over six months away, it finally occurred to me the other day to put the “Learning from Obama” e-book — available as text and PDF on Epolitics.com since August, 2009 — in the Amazon store for the Kindle-lovers out there to download. It IS, after all, the most comprehensive guide to Barack Obama’s 2008 online campaign I know of, and required reading in undergrad and graduate-level communications classes at universities across the country. Plus, if you want to analyze the political effect of what’s happening online this year, it helps to know what happened last time — particularly since I’d argue that the 2008 Obama campaign was an important moment not just in the digital political world but for the larger internet culture as well.
In any case, it’s also good practice for publishing the “Winning in 2012” e-book, which is coming out shortly. Kindle self-publishing turns out to have some annoying quirks, but it wasn’t TOO painful once I used Mobipocket Creator to build the Kindle-friendly version starting from an HTML base. For the first time I’m charging for an e-book — for the benefit of reading it on Kindle, I’m asking them to pay $1.99 (though you can still read it on Epolitics.com for free). We’ll see what happens! If you happen to be a habitue of the Amazon Store, will you do me a huge favor? Please give it a thumbs-up! And perhaps someone who’s read it will even volunteer to write a review…for which I would shower thanks upon you.
P.S. One other experiment: I switched the subtitle in the Amazon version to “A Comprehensive Guide to His Groundbreaking 2008 Online Presidential Campaign” (it had been, “Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond”). I’m hoping the change will make it a little clearer for people browsing the Amazon store to grasp what it contains at first glance.
– cpd