Having both bought and published books via both PoD and eBook, and long honed my layout skills as a professional technical author (including X/HTML), dare I offer the voice of experience.
First, Print-on-Demand (PoD). It is absurd to print a book in one country and then ship it to another. The big PoD publishers have print houses (or agreements with same) in all the major countries, so postage is never more than local. Secondly, a huge variety of formats and bindings are available one way and another, and you can get a book published in many of them, on the global marketplace and with free ISBN, for the cost price of one proof copy, probably less than £20. People (some of them here) moan endlessly about the traps they have fallen into, or fear doing so, but I have used Lulu.com from day one without a single showstopper. For example Lulu will chase down a dud copy and give the printer responsible hell. Just return it to them, sit back and wait. Other PoD publishers may charge various levels of fee.
Then, eBooks. There are three main formats: PDF, ePub and Kindle. All can have copy protections applied by the publisher, with some being harder to crack than others. Pirated copies are usually made available as free downloads, but beware: either the file itself or the download site will be infected with malware, as this is the whole reason the pirate can be bothered to crack the protection. In other words, a pirated eBook is usually just bait to catch the fish. Pirating will happen, but its impact on your sales will be limited.
- PDF is easy to create, especially if you want to sell it alongside a print edition. Just copy your wordprocessor file, tweak its ISBN and front matter as required, and Save As... A good publisher will check your formatting and add copy protections.
- ePub is best created using specialist authoring tools. Nowadays it is quite a rich format and there are several standards of richness to choose from, not all supported by all e-readers (e.g. colour, page size, multimedia, etc). So you need to match your format to your market. Free tools such as calibri are popular, but not as easy to use as regular wordprocessors or DTP packages. I create my ePubs, complete with XML markup, in a text editor. I wrote a Linux script to compile the zip without making any mistakes.
- Kindle is proprietary to Amazon, and they are good at converting whatever format you throw at them into Kindle. While your market is of course confined to Amazon, theirs is the biggest eBook market out there, so the loss is minimal.
I have published eBooks via several routes, but only my Lulu eBooks have sold. Like their global PoD options, they go out to all the major retailers and distributors, including Amazon, Ingram, Barnes & Noble, Apple, etc. etc.
The voice of experience that I offer, and is all too often ignored, is to check out Lulu.com, as well as a few others that a search on "best PoD or eBook publishers" will rub your nose in, and only start complaining if you know exactly which of your requirements they cannot deliver on.
Having said that, my PoD editions sell faster than the eBooks, and for higher royalties.