One of the new trends on the Internet is the sale of e-books, both as a way to create revenue for the authors and useful information for the readers.

Unfortunately, most ebooks sold on the Internet look cheap. They may have a nice cover image, but the interior pages look worst than a high-school term paper.

No wonder many people out there still don't take ebook authors seriously! They see them as amateurs taking advantage of the democratization of the Internet.

Having worked for a small publishing company, I know firsthand the importance of good interior design. But I also have many years of experience writing for the web and am aware of the trends out there. I know the good and the bad of both worlds.

The traditional publishing industry has its merits-- they are great at distributing books and making celebrities out of a few authors. But the competition is fierce and only a handful of writers get published. That means that 99% of the other writers out there have no chance of ever seeing their book on print.

Enter the Internet and the e-book wave. Now everybody can publish. There are no gatekeepers.

While this freedom of information is great, we have also lost quality. Most ebooks look cheap, are hardly edited or proofread, and are obviously written in a rush.

Depending on your audience, you may or may not have the liberty of being sloppy. In my experience, this is true among Internet Marketers--as long as you promise your readers they'll earn a lot of money (or traffic), you can get away with a poorly designed and poorly written product. In fact, some ebooks candidly advice not to worry about format or even grammar.

That was an advice I could not take for my first e-book, Becoming a Medical Writer. Not only because I am a journalist by training but because my audience was medical writers and editors. I certainly could not be sloppy with them!

In any case, sloppiness should be the exception, not the rule in the ebook publishing world.

What would happen if e-book authors start displaying the same quality in their e-books as the traditional book industry? Would this improve sales?

I'm sure it would. And I'm also sure that e-book authors that get hold of this concept will have a great advantage over their competitors.

The good news is that you don't need to be an expert graphic designer or own expensive and hard to use software to create quality e-books. You can create a professional book layout in MS Word if you know how to format your document correctly. In fact there are Web sites and video tutorials that teach you how to do this.

Perhaps one day e-book authors will raise their standards and produce better info-products. This would not only benefit them but their readers as well.