ePub ?

Thanks to all of you who have bought my eBooks so far, and thanks to all of you who have been so kind to drop me a personal note saying how much you've enjoyed them so far. Tomorrow I will be buying an iPad. Not because I love the idea of the device. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that it's very expensive for such a 'slave', a device that you can't simply create things on. Everything has to be sync'd down onto it. Which seems like a crazy idea to me, but I can see the appeal. It's a sexy device.

I feel it's just the start though. I think the publishing world is on the brink of being shaken up the same way that the music business was when Napster arrived and people were moving music into the digital domain.

I'd like to get my eBooks onto Apple's iBooks store, but at the moment, it's a very closed system. I have to go through some broker to do it, and they want exclusivity of my eBooks. I don't want that. I want to be able to distribute my eBooks in any way and in any channel that I'd like to. So at the moment I'm stuck.

The other thing is that most eBook readers want your eBooks to be in the ePub format, which does not suit photography books well. ePub has no layout (as far as I can tell). It is designed for text books where there is a continuous flow.

So I guess I'm posting this - asking for some help. Does anyone know firstly of a good outlet where I can get my eBooks up on the iBooks store, and secondly, does anyone have any experience of conversion to ePub and how best to illustrate photo books in this format?

I should stress that currently, you can view my eBooks on the iPad by using one of the third-party PDF readers. They're a little flaky (c'mon, the iPad is green), so you have to take things as they are at present, but the books look good on the device.