Slashdot Mirror

1.5.0.6. The analysis resulted in 611 defects and 71

You do realize that 611 + 71 is 682. And that 1506 + 682 = 2188. And that Feburary 1st, 1988 is in the year 1988, and that Kevin Karpenske who gave Firefox his domain has been (scroll down to see the post).

An *exposition* on *firefox*, well duh!

I don't know if he was purposely dishonest, but his prices were far too high for what he was providing. The first chapter was free, each subsequent chapter had a price for download. The overall price was roughly the same as a hardcover edition yet all you got was an electronic copy. This doomed it to failure in my mind and the prices seemed outrageous enough that it looked to be an experiment designed to prove that there's no market for electronic distribution.

Compare this to efforts like Tad William's Shadowmarch or Baen's free downloads. Tad's is failing because he's not making enough to cover the bandwidth costs, support costs and his salary but its not due to an overly inflated price. Baen's is succeeding because they're using it purely to drive up sales of otherwise overlooked hard copy books.

Shadowmarch is published in plain HTML fairly portable and open really.

Are you aware of Tad Williams' Shadowmarch? (Also see slashdot story 1 and 2)
It's his latest fantasy story, but he's publishing it online - completely on his own, no publishers involved. ($18 for a subscription of a year (first 5 episodes can be read for free), for which instead of proprietary formats used by far too many epublishing projects, you get regular HTML files - it's so good to be able to grep through your local copies to quickly find other references to characters or events.)
And although he's making far less money with it than with regular books, from what I know the site should be paying for itself. Which makes this a very interesting development for all authors wanting to do without publishers. Once you're a big name author, it is possible. :)
And I'm thinking, the more projects like this that will actually be somewhat succesful, the sooner people will be willing to give less known authors a try as well. Every satisfying experience will create more demand for similar projects, and will make other authors consider doing this sort of thing as well. Who knows, we might just not be doomed to eBooks after all... :)

As you also mentioned, the almost immediate reader feedback on what he writes was one of the major reasons to start this project. And I as a reader just love seeing how remarks and suggestions made about previous episodes have a noticeable impact on new episodes.

We hope the project will make money, of course, but we already know that we can make a living if I write regular novels. (I'm going to continue to write standard books as well as Shadowmarch - there will be announcements on the site about my other projects.) We're very willing to try this as an experiment. But if people start passing too many free copies of the Shadowmarch story around and we get to the point where it doesn't pay for itself anymore, then I'll have to stop doing it, and nobody (me included) will get to find out where it's going. But I don't want to put too much emphasis on that. Most net-users are honest folk anyway, and my readership has always been the best of the best in all ways.