Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Some background - I have written technical books for the past 15 years, and after my first two books were published by a traditional publisher, I started self-publishing in PDF format, first using Adobe FrameMaker, and after moving to a Mac, Adobe InDesign. I actually have been quite happy with my book sales, all through my own website, all PDF only. That said, I just helped an author self-publish a "print" book on Lulu.com, and it got me thinking about additional ways to get the word out on my books. I've sold thousands of PDFs, and honestly only had a handful of folks ever complain that they were not available in print, but I was surprised to find that for our "pre-sales" run at least, 43% of our pre-sales were print versions. In our industry (and I guess in most technical writing) the shelf-life is pretty short, so print versions seem almost obsolete the day they print. Also, it's rare that an index is really "great" for these books, so the ability to search a PDF is pretty useful. And as for Kindle and ePub, technical books often have a lot of screenshots, and the layout in ebooks can be quite lacking. That said, with all of the drawbacks, it seems like adding print and ebook formats other than PDF might be useful overall.

Are there other technical writers here who have ventured past PDF into other formats? I would prefer POD for the print books, and am just trying to figure out my best options for various ebook formats. And ultimately, I will not put out any version other than the PDFs on my own site for at least 1 month after a book is available in order to have those who know of my site buy directly from me before the book is available in other venues.

Do you have preferred POD printers for technical books? Do you use the same POD site for distributing your ePubs (i.e., sites like Lulu) or do you use different sites for different purposes? I already have a Bowker account and purchase my ISBNs in blocks from them, so I really don't need to worry about whether a site supplies those, and I also publish all of my books under my own publishing company name, so I additionally do not want sites that insist on using their name as the "publisher" of the book. I'm looking for printers and distribution sites essentially!

I appreciate any advice from the trenches you can provide!

Thanks!

Danita