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One way to meet the costs of e-book production is to keep those costs close to zero. Free blogging sites have made it simple for authors to produce blogs and other sorts of websites; additional tools are available to add keywords, links, and images. Other tools can convert a blog or similar website to the EPUB format; EPUB export is available in Apple's Pages word processor and it's likely that other programs will soon follow suit.
Given these tools, authors can produce e-books on their own, with no other expense than the value of their time. For "With a Little Help", Doctorow did most of the production himself; as the title suggests, he got friends to help out with things such as cover and book design.
In the "Do It Yourself" or DIY model, there are essentially no expenses to recoup. If the author wants to earn something, additional money needs to be spent on an ISBN and a bit more to get metadata into a feed for Amazon. But if income is not the object, the e-book can simply be posted on a website and made available to the world. A CC license allows the e-books to be distributed in a wide variety of channels.
In fact, with the consent of the editor, this book chapter will be released as a DIY open-access e-book in EPUB format, with a CC BY-ND license. The author hopes to profit primarily from the experience of doing so.
