Not that long ago a friend of mine asked me if he should upgrade his computer to be able to start an eBook publishing business. He was using a laptop that was a few years old and that didn’t have a lot of memory or computer processing power. I took a look at the laptop and quickly concluded that it was perfectly usable. I asked my friend if he had an offline storage device. He wasn’t sure what I meant. This scared me.
Let me explain. When you get involved with the eBook publishing business, it’s not as if though we’re designing rocket ships or buildings. You don’t need super fancy computer software that requires massive computational power. The most you need is a word processing program. Most new computers that have been purchased within the past 5 or 6 years easily meet the computational requirements necessary to create electronic books. That’s not the real concern. The real concern that I have is when people don’t seem to have any external backup devices.
When you create eBooks, it’s critical that you have backup of the word processing files. If your computer were to stop functioning, all your important information could potentially be lost forever. I’ve got three external hard drives, and two online services where I backup my critical data. You think that’s going overboard? If so, that’s the mentality of an employee. Someone who goes to work, is told what to do, and does it like an obedient servant. When you’re in business for yourself, and don’t ever want to have to return to taking orders from other people, you’ll find yourself taking your business very seriously. To that end, having multiple redundant backups is essential. So that’s it. A basic computer system that was new within the past 5 or 6 years, and an external backup system. Those are the essential computer requirements to get started in this business.