I have exchange a few emails with Collin about this, and I hope I convinced him to consider.
I don't think this market is as limited as you think, though you may be too old to see it. (Sorry, couldn't help myself!
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Seriously, though, at $25 in print, he's barely breaking even. At $25 per e-book, Amazon and Apple would let him keep $17.50. There are a *lot* of aviation enthusiasts out there, so go on a few podcasts and into some magazines in Australia and you probably sell a couple of hundred. Get some international interest and you may get into 4 figures. All without having to lug 1.4 KG books to the post office.
Not too shabby and even if you started it as a labour of love, there's nothing wrong with ending up with at least paying for a nice holiday out of it!
It doesn't cost anything to put it on the Amazon Kindle store and all you need to do is upload the word or PDF document. If you can self-publish on paper, you can certainly manage an e-book.
Sure, there will be folks like you who want to book as keepsake, maybe get it signed by the author. Many enthusiasts like me just want to read the stories even though they have no sentimental value to us.
I may not know a thing about flying big jets or much of the work the flight engineers like you did. But I know a thing or two about the realities of "new media" and just how big and tech savvy the aviation market is. (We have plenty of customers in their 70s and 80s using an iPad with our product!)
And this is all constructive criticism, of course; I just want the see more material like this more easily accessible!
