Creating an e-book is easy. Creating a professional-looking, classy e-book that stands out from the crowd takes skill and effort. And as e-book formats improve and start to offer greater flexibility and complexity, you're going to need advanced skills to really exploit their potential.

Not that long ago, Apple introduced iBook support for fixed format ePub files, aimed at publishers who want to produce picture books (photography, art, comics). And Amazon is in the process of introducing Kindle Format 8 (KF8). This is, essentially, an extension of the HTML commands supported by Kindle devices. Embracing HTML5 and CSS3, KF8 will ultimately make the .mobi and .azw formats currently used by Kindles obsolete. The advantage of KF8 is that it will allow for complex and creative page designs, with embedded images and rich media. Again, this is aimed at illustrated books.

The two most popular and successful e-books formats - Kindle (.mobi/.azw) and ePub - are essentially HTML web pages with various kinds of wrapping (mainly XML and, sometimes, copy protection). In essence, there's nothing difficult about them. But hand-coding HTML is tedious. That's why most of us use some kind of software packge to output the files.

You might create your book as a Word document and then have your e-book publishing service (Kindle, Smashwords, Lulu or whoever) convert the file to the formats you want. This is very easy, but it tends to produce pretty basic e-books. You may be missing a properly clickable chapter listing, for example.

At WebVivant Press, we lay out books in InDesign, output to ePub and do a little hand-coding on the resulting files. This produces high-quality e-books. However, this workflow isn't going to support KF8.

We may see tools come along soon that allow you to exploit all the possibilities of advanced formats such as KF8. But they're not here yet and, when they do arrive, they're likely to be expensive, professional-level packages, such as InDesign.

Adding rich content like video, animation and sound is no easy matter, either.

It's likely, then, that the only people with access to the skills and resources necessary to fully benefit from the advanced formats will be professional publishers (or self-publishers).

The self-publishing world is awash with shoddy, amateur works, thrown together by people with no real talent or training in book production. Of course, sometimes you may find a gem among the dross. But it's difficult to tell which books have been created by people with real skills and which hacked out over a weekend by some clueless wannabe.

The development of advanced e-book formats may give professionals a chance to differentiate themselves. Perhaps it may even save the publishing industry if enough people are motivated to seek out well-produced works. In the new self-publishing era, publishers need a reason to exist. That reason may be: quality.

WebVivant Press has just published my first collection of short stories, Twisting Tales.  I'm delighted about this because WebVivant is aimed at the market for electronic books.  Although it's fast gaining in popularity, this way of reading is still a relatively new idea, so WebVivant Press wisely ensures that its publications are also available as a paper version. But as a Kindle user myself I believe that WebVivant Press is one of the pioneers of a new way of publishing.

The Kindle has many attractions which include the obvious green credentials and the possibility of carrying around 3,500 books in a device that is no bigger or heavier than a paperback. I've had my Kindle for about four months now and I love it.  I'm reading more and in a different kind of way.  I experiment with books I might not have previously considered reading as it would have required an effort to obtain the paper version and the electronic one could be downloaded in a minute.  Now I always have a choice of books with me, depending on what I'm in the mood to read.  Kindle have hundreds of books that are free, or cost only pence.  With my Kindle I can have a number of books on the go at once - I can move from one book to another, cross reference (the dictionary is a wonderful bonus), and the Kindle always saves my place for me.

It seems almost too good to be true - there has to be a catch, and sadly I think I've found one, namely Amazon's pricing policy.  After the first flush of downloading the free books and the books that cost next-to-nothing I started to search for books for my Kindle that had recently been published.  I was surprised to discover that they weren't that cheap - maybe a couple of quid cheaper than the paperback, but not much.

Then yesterday, into my Inbox popped an email that said it had some great deals for my Kindle.  I had a look - I was particularly interested in reading some of the books on the Orange Prize Short List.  But they didn't seem like particularly good deals, so I had a quick look in Amazon.co.uk where I could compare the prices for paperbacks and Kindle versions.

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna is £5.11 for the paperback and £4.60 for the Kindle version. So the Kindle is 51p cheaper.  Not brilliant, but still cheaper. But then ... Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson costs £4.25 for the paperback and £4.99 for the Kindle version -  74p more expensive. And how about if I want to buy the Orange Prize Winner - The Tiger's Wife by  Téa Obreht? If I want a version for my Kindle I have to pay £4.99 as opposed to £3.99 for the paperback.

I know quite a few people who have Kindles and iPads, but I have to say that at the moment I know more people who don't.   And I've also heard many people say they could never give up the pleasure of physically holding and owning a book.  The jury is still out, but I believe that just as it has now become common to keep your music collection on an iPod, electronic books will become mainstream.  It's just a matter of how long it takes. Almost every day there's a new electronic reading device on the market.  But if we are going to be able to enjoy the advantages of electronic books, something is going to have to happen to tip the balance in their favour and price has got to be a major factor.

Electronic books make reading easy, so if priced competitively people will buy more of them.  So Amazon, isn't it time to take a sensible approach and allow electronic publications to take their rightful place in the book market?  They are cheaper to produce than paper books, so they should be cheaper to buy

Clare Le May

All I wanted to do was transfer some money from my NatWest bank account in the UK to my account in France.

Simple, right? I mean, it was my money. I wasn't begging for a loan, or asking for anything that I hadn't done before, many, many times.

But this time I made a mistake. I asked them to do it over the phone.

A bit of background. I've lived in France for 11 years. During that time, I've made many transfers from NatWest to my account here, usually by including the request in a letter accompanying cheques I've paid in. I also use the NatWest online banking service. Alas, unlike HSBC (which benefited from my custom for a few years) NatWest's online service doesn't permit foreign transfers.

Easy, I thought, I'll give 'em a ring. I'm sure they'll be glad to hear from me.

According to NatWest's own website, if you have an online banking account, you can use the same PIN and password for phone banking. Bzzzt! Wrong!

"Um, I'm afraid your account isn't authorised for phone banking. You don't have a PIN and password."

"Yes I do."

"No you don't."

"But I do."

"No, really, you don't."

We were careering terrifyingly towards the retort "computer says no". Luckily, we veered off at the last moment and came to a juddering halt with, "we'll look into this and call you back."

They didn't.

That was on a Friday. I did my best to enjoy the weekend, but was acutely aware that I needed that money in my French account. Banks in France are every bit as obtuse and unhelpful as UK banks, but they're also mean. If you go overdrawn without permission, it's a criminal offence and you can be denied access to a bank account for years, even if they don't guillotine you.

On Monday I called again. This wasn't something to be undertaken lightly. It invariably involved holding because NatWest's 24/7 phone banking team is clearly understaffed. Once through to them, they would check with my private banking team. But because they're also obviously understaffed, that involved the 24/7 person being on hold to them while I was on hold to him.

Finally, he came back to me.

"There is a way of doing this," he said. I could almost hear the boyish glee in his voice. "If you send a fax--"

"Let me stop you right there," I said. I'm in the middle of the countryside. Getting access to a fax machine would involve an annoying, un-eco and inconvenient drive. Online fax services I've looked at generally want you to sign up for accounts, billed monthly. Or they allow you to send only simple, text-only faxes. I'd need to send a signed document, with sensitive details like my bank account info. I don't like to trust that stuff to unknown third parties.

And why don't I have my own fax machine? Because it's not the 19-fucking-80s, that's why.

Oh, I know what the people at the bank are thinking. "Actually, you'll find that faxing is still quite common in banking." Yeah, so is wearing chalk-stripe suits and paying incompetent executives fat bonuses, but you won't find real people thinking it's a good idea.

I got angry. It seemed to work.

"I've spoken to my manager and she'll call you back within the hour."

She didn't. Not then. Not ever.

Clearly, they were baffled. According to their systems, anyone with an online banking account must have access to phone banking. But their screens were telling them this wasn't the case. This threw their world off-axis. It wasn't just the computers that couldn't cope. Somehow the system was wrong. One person I spoke to actually said to me, "This can't happen". Oh good, that makes me feel so much better.

Tuesday I was busy - you know, earning a living and shit.

So my next call was on Wednesday.

"You're account isn't authorised for phone banking."

I know, so fucking authorise it. (I'm paraphrasing. I was more polite on the phone. I am English, you know.)

"I'll just talk to your private banking team." There followed a long wait for both of us. Apparently, the staffing levels weren't getting any better. Finally, "If you just send a fax--"

That call didn't end well. Apparently, they were going to call me back.

They didn't.

That was yesterday. Almost the identical conversation took place this morning. To be honest, it was all starting to become something of a blur.

They said they'd call me back. But I had a surprise in store for them. I called them back. Ha!

After a relatively short aeon, I got through to my private banking team. They put me through to 'foreign'. They had no idea what to do about this situation and put me through to someone else who was supposed to be able to help. Or, to be precise, they put me through to another understaffed unit, which gave me time to enjoy the third movement of the bank's hold music. (It's still in my head, dammit!)

When the call was answered, this person was every bit as baffled as the rest. And I had another little conversation that I'd had several times before.

You see, I have actually succeeded in doing this. Just a month before I'd managed to persuade someone at NatWest (and oh god I wish I could remember who it was) to actually make the transfer. They even mailed me a 'retained transaction number' so I could repeat the performance in the future without the tedious process of reading out long IBAN and BIC numbers.

And so, several times, I had this conversation.

Me: "I've done this before. A month ago."

Them: "Over the phone?"

Me: "Yes."

Sound of keys being tapped.

Them: "On the 10th?"

Me: "Yes."

Them: "How?"

Me: <facepalm>

So, anyway, on my fifth call I started to near the point of criticality. I think they picked up on it. It's possible that they use voice stress analysis - some insurance and financial firms employ this on customer calls to detect fraud. If they were measuring my stress level, the needle would have already whizzed past 11.

I should point out at this stage that everyone I spoke to was unfailingly polite and eager to help. It was the system that was letting them down as much as it was failing me.

As the woman at NatWest struggled to find someone, anyone, who could help, I found myself on hold again and again.

"I'll put you through to your private banking team," she said at last.

I think I may have screamed. Certainly there was a loud shriek of anguish in my head. She read the signs. Another hold and then ... the holy grail. A supervisor. Finally I'd achieved the success sought by everyone making a customer helpline call. I'd been escalated.

He was contrite. Abashed, even. Maybe a little ashamed.

And he had a confession to make. "We can't do this for you today."

He said he'd raised a complaint. That all my calls would be noted and that I would be reimbursed for them. That they would look into the issue that had caused this problem, and that I would get a call back within five days.

But they couldn't make the transfer.

Maybe they've got a point about the faxes. I used to do it that way, when I had a fax machine. (I still have it somewhere. It's probably next to my 386SX-powered PC, my Miami Vice jacket and my collection of prog-rock mix tapes.) Life seemed simpler then.

The whole point of computers is to streamline and automate processes. Look. It says so right on your computer. "Designed to make your life easier," it says. (Okay, maybe not on your computer, but it's on mine. Because I just wrote it there. In green crayon. Which makes it official.)

How could it get this fucked-up?

Oh, I know how this happened. I've been a customer of NatWest's online banking service since the early days when it was a trial programme with just a few hundred participants. The service changed somewhat and, shortly after, NatWest launched phone banking. Although the bank might enable both services at once for new customers, for us old lags it would be necessary to copy our details from the online banking customer database to the phone banking database. This simple replication of a few fields in a database is what seems to be beyond the ken of NatWest's brightest minds.

FFS, this stuff isn't hard. Even second-year comp sci students can do that kind of thing. Given the time, I could probably sort NatWest's databases myself with a simple SQL injection attack via their website - or get the boys from LulzSec to do it. But that would take time and it's time that things like online and telephone banking are supposed to save.

So what did I do? I wrote a letter (remember those?). I jammed it into a cleft stick and handed that to a carrier pigeon who'd agreed to come out of retirement for one last job. Oh no, wait, that's the spec screenplay I'm working on...

I saved the letter as a PDF and emailed that to a mate in the UK. He printed it out, stuffed it into an envelope which he then addressed. He then walked to the post office and mailed it via special delivery. Tomorrow (Royal Mail, blessed be its name) it will be in the hands of some foot-sore postman, worn down by the constant threat of joblessness because people keep telling him that the Internet has made letters obsolete. And yet, weirdly, the mail never stops coming. I think we now know why... Anyway, this luckless minion will deliver my letter to NatWest, and do you know what they will probably do with it? Scan it, so they can put it on the computer.

I can't compute the cost to the planet (paper, postal delivery etc) or my mate (although, luckily, he works for beer, so I'll fix that next time I see him). But I do know I'm now a lot, lot older than I was last Friday.

All self-publishing platforms allow you to set your own price, and this is important because control over pricing is key to your whole marketing strategy.

Alas, when it comes to the Kindle, there's a problem.

At WebVivant Press, we're about to publish a book that we've priced at €2.99 in Europe and $4.50 in the US. And so, via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, that's the price we set. And, indeed, if you're based in the US, that's the price you see.

Amazon does warn you that, if you make the book available to customers outside the US, local taxes will apply. For European (but non-UK) customers, this means adding the standard rate of Value Added Tax (VAT). That's 15%, so I expected to see the price as $5.18. Instead, it comes up as $7.48!

I contacted Amazon and got fobbed off with a boilerplate reply explaining that, "There are a number of reasons why prices for Kindle titles may vary from region to region, including taxes and other operating costs."

That's a wholly inadequate response (and we're not letting it rest there). Amazon needs to come up with a more transparent pricing structure that allows publishers to set actual retail prices.

With this book, we opted for the 70% royalty scheme, but on a retail price of $7.48, we'll actually see only 42%. It means the book is far more expensive than we'd like, and our only method of fixing that is to take a smaller royalty. By my (rough) reckoning, we'd have to drop the royalty per sale from $3.15 to $1.30 to get a decent retail price for the book in Europe.

Amazon is making it difficult for Kindle self-publishers to employ a professional and commercial approach to marketing their books. And I'd like to know into whose pockets that extra $2.30 is disappearing.