There are dozens of e-publishers, and new ones are popping up all the time. See Resources and Professional Organizations for links to some of them. Many are of the "vanity press" variety, in which authors pay for publication. Few offer more than rudimentary editing, if any. Though author advances are rare, the economics of e-publishing allows for comparatively large royalties. These are generally accompanied, unfortunately, by low retail prices and modest sales.

The following are several existing approaches to selling and distributing ebooks via the Internet:

• Project Gutenberg, which has been in existence since 1971, makes public-domain literature free and available for download in "Plain Vanilla ASCII," the most basic of file formats, readable by any word-processing program. Other e-publishers also offer plain text (.txt) downloads.
• Numerous e-publishers sell or give away ebooks formatted in PDF. A few e-publishers also offer ebooks in Rocket Ebook, SoftBook, Palm OS, or Windows CE format, and some offer some books in paper by means of POD (print-on-demand).
• Bibliobytes makes books (both public domain and copyrighted) readable online, and generates ad revenue--and author royalties--by putting a banner ad on each page.
• Fatbrain's Ematter has recently won a great deal of media attention with their unique approach. Ematter accepts virtually any manuscript, of virtually any length. After authors upload their documents to the Ematter Web site, the documents are encrypted in Adobe's PDF format and made available for purchase at the author's chosen price. Once downloaded, the documents can be read and printed, but not digitally copied. Ematter keeps 50% of each purchase.