Freelance journalist Graham Smith of Mediaworld has taken on the challenge of building the e-book website bestbooksonline.net which publishes work by authors and journalists from all over the world.

The site gives writers who would normally be rejected by traditional publishers the chance to publish their work.

Graham spoke to Holdthefrontpage about the potential of this new technology and the changes it could bring to the world of regional newspapers.

“Bestbooksonline has only been going for a couple of months but already we have had a great demand from writers from all over the world who are sick of traditional publishers rejecting their work,” said Graham.

“I found the software (TK3) in the USA and it is better than the PDF format.”

By downloading the software for free, readers can view the first three chapters of a book to see if they like it before deciding if they want to buy it.

Graham said: “This is a shop window for new authors and now that we have been registered with search engines we are getting about 100 visitors a day.

“There are about 25 e-books that we are putting up on the site and we’ve had three more come in just this week.

“We have had books come in from Hawaii, Canada, Australia, Egypt and New Zealand as well as the UK, all of amazing quality. There has not been anything that I’ve thought ‘this is a load of garbage’.”

The site also aims to be visually pleasing so people are able to print out the work if they wish.

Graham said: “The presentation has got to be spot on for the writers, because it would be very easy to create a mish-mash of a website with free e-book software packages which are quite tacky. We are aiming to be the Guardian of e-books with a nice cover design for each one, putting them in the shop window.

“There is huge potential for regional newspapers to introduce virtual formats of their newspapers. I don’t see the virtual form as a take-over of newspapers, but more of ‘and-as-well-as’ situation.

“Newspapers could ‘drop’ their contents into the virtual form and it would be available to anyone straight away.

“It is a good selling point for the commercial side because of the huge advertising potential – somebody on the other side of the world may wait a week to be delivered a regional newspaper but could access it straight away with it in virtual form.

“I think people have had a re-think about the potential of the Internet. A lot more older people can be reached now through the Internet and they are the traditional readership of these newspapers.

“A lot of them just want a good read and some humour which is often being missed out at the moment. I’m really going to be marketing what we are doing.

“We have the potential to publish graphics and audio and make it more generally visually pleasing.

“The audio book is more of a challenge but we have had our first order and there is tremendous mileage for the visually impaired or blind accessing the work.”