Gives Away eBook Tutorial in Attempt to Save Trees

Bellevue, WA (June 7, 2010) – eBook publisher EasyOnMe thought they were saving trees by releasing their “how-to” books electronically. A large percentage of their customers proved them wrong, and now EasyOnMe is trying to make amends. Technical support data revealed that almost 40% of customers who purchase the course materials in PDF form actually print the books out at home, despite the fact that one product is almost 300 pages long.

EasyOnMe Releases “SuperCharge Your eBook Learning Powers” as free eBook

Believing that this is due to insufficient knowledge of some fundamental computer skills, EasyOnMe has rushed out a tutorial on how to learn from an eBook. The tutorial, called Supercharge Your eBook Learning Powers, is available as a free download from the company’s website and is meant for use by anyone, not just purchasers of EasyOnMe products.

Save a Tree! Get our free eBook on reading eBooks!

Ironic Reversal of Formative Microsoft Experience

Said EasyOnMe CEO Tom Campbell: “This is the exact opposite of an experience I had as a program manager at Microsoft way back in 1996. I insisted that one of our programming products (Visual Basic 5.0) come with a printed manual at a time when printed manuals were dying, and I didn’t want to admit it. Marketing compromised by printing up a batch of manuals, then including a coupon with the final product for free manuals, shipping included. Guess what: we ended up with a warehouse full of unused product because no one wanted printed documentation, even free. So I thought shipping our books as PDF files would be a no-brainer in 2010. Wrong again!”

Obscure PDF Viewer Provides One Critical Feature

Campbell thinks the solution lies in a bit of user education. It’s a combination of learning just a few keystrokes familiar to most power users, and in using a free, lightweight PDF viewer called FoxIt with a notable feature seemingly made for power learning online: a browser-like Back button, which allows the user to return from following a hyperlink within the PDF document. Adobe’s Acrobat reader lacks this feature.

“Sounds ridiculous, but the Back button is incredibly important for learning,” Campbell said. “When you don’t have an easy to way to get back to where you linked from, you don’t use links very often. It’s just too unwieldy to set a bookmark or whatever when all you want to do is follow a link. The Back button changes all that. It makes learning online a whole new experience, because you’re much more likely to spend a few moments learning something new or reviewing something else.”

“I still think users will sharply reduce their printer overuse when they learn how easy it is to flip back and forth between your PDF viewer using Alt+Tab (or Cmd+Tab on a Macintosh). Following links is a no-brainer when you can find your way back as quickly as you can on a browser. That simply can’t be done with Adobe Acrobat, but FoxIt reader is small, fast, free, and has the all-powerful Back button,” Campbell points out.

EasyOnMe Hopes to Advance Learning With Innovative Courseware

Guilt-stricken EasyOnMe, Inc. publishes high-quality “how-to” materials, with its tree-killing flagship product, On the Web in an Hour, aimed at small business owners who are sick of overpaying webmasters to create websites that can’t be changed or added to easily. While On the Web in an Hour is a for-pay course, Supercharge Your eBook Learning Powers is free for anyone and can be applied to any eBook system on personal computers.

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