Slashdot Mirror
Internet Publishing Can Pay Off
An anonymous reader writes "Leander Kahney of Wired News has an article (Net Publishing Made Profitable) about how the publishers of the free, online newsletter TidBITS have hit the jackpot with their highly focused Take Control ebook series (nicely formatted PDFs that are easy to read on screen or print). Authors earn 50% royalties, and the books cost $5 or $10, with free updates. All the books out right now are about Mac topics, but maybe they'll branch out in the future."
Now these books will appear on every god damn P2P network out there.
I've often wondered why this very business method wouldn't work in the music business. Part of the problem, I think, is that music success nowadays is too dependant on radio. The whole indy process keeps those that can't afford to push bribe their way into radio stations from being heard. I think this is a business method that Apple should embrace with iTunes. The artist could pay $X dollars to sell their music on iTunes. The artist could then make 50% of the procedes. Apple could even charge to burn the music to CDs and mail it out. I think this would work very well.
Windows for Linux Users! Text File format Only.
:-D
Ahem - First Post
Coding my way to the next BSOD!
This is great news for internet publishers and people who like to read books on the internet, but I'd be quite interested to know the effects of offering a book online for free while concurrently releasing it in print, like several of our favorite computer manuals.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Is this an example of the astroturfing we were warned about?
Aswell, I've heard other people criticize the whole ebook thing because they think its not as clear (to look at) or something. If you doubt me, you should just walk into a best buy or something and play with them yourself.
Hi there
Mac users like/can pay for stuff.
:)
Beginning with their ridiculously overpriced PPC's, to iTunes, shareware software...
Your typical Linux geek or Windows pirate isn't really used to the concept of "paying for computer stuff". He just downloads it. Can it work?
Then again, good weblogs can lead to dead-trees publishing deals. I hope someone will pick me up some time
In the US it's spelled "tidbit", and has been for many years. Linguistic drift due to American cultural puritanism at its finest, but the term is here to stay. Remember the whole Janet Jackson boob blowup...
use Sig::Witty;
Mac users are used to paying for things. Software, shareware, etc. Linux users expect everything for free, and Windows users just pirate it.
Dude you fail it. Even googlewar says so. ;-)
Yep - more like 4th post - looked like a good shot at the time I wrote it
Coding my way to the next BSOD!
Google is an american company and therefore doesn't know any better.
The artist could then make 50% of the procedes
You've even guessed correctly the percentage that the artist gets from each sale.
As long as they cover the genre's that you like, they've got some great music. Highly recommended.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
based on this news here i'd love to see more of my favorite e-zines to be in pdf format
/.'ers think about phrack.org using txt and pdf for there following issues
2600.com
phrack.org
i know others i've talked to would love them in downloadable pdf format even if we had to pay for them
what do other
--- Website: http://spinhex.sytes.net/
Just look at when Stephen King tried to do a similar system with "The Plant." Sales were so abysmal that he didnt even finish it after writing a few parts.
m l
See the story http://slashdot.org/features/00/11/30/1238204.sht
duh, it's nothing to do with google the "company" per se, but instead the sheer number of pages that use the correct spelling vs those that don't.
You mean all this time I've been doing it wrong by placing tiny classified ads?
I must say, this seems like a bad example. First of all, the books are all about Mac software. Why would I want to read that on a PDA? If we're talking about downloading to a computer, why would I want to pay money when a few minutes of Google will help me out? Sure, it's convenient. But it's not even guaranteed. And $10 seems like a high price for an electronic document covering basic material. I suppose neophyte Macaddicts may spring for it but there are plenty of free resources. All in all, I think Baen books are a much better example.
harmonious design
If titbit blows some tiny american mind, find that person and discuss the nesting habits of the Great Tit with them...
--
I recently purchased several hiking trail guides in PDF version from a website. It was extremely convienent having the information readily accessible via my iPaq while hiking.
:)
Great idea
I'm sorry, have you not all been reading the on-line mags and such? Your local newspaper? There is no way to make money on the internet giving away things for free. Rob Enderle of SCO has something to say about this (Free Software and the Fools That Use it). Thank you very much.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
According to Dictionary.com, it's either.
I truly do have karma to burn, so I'm going to test out a thoery...
Do people with low UIDs go around looking for Low UID threads, and reply?
Time will tell...
These Take Control books are really short (less than 70 pages). I've bought a lot of professional books. Most of them approach 1000 pages. Even the index is over 40 pages.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
One great thing that Engst mentioned (but it was sort of glossed over by the writer) was this: these e-things are promoted in Tidbits.
This gives them -the- major advantage over most eBooks: PR.
What people seem to have forgotten (though it was talked about a lot) is what publishing houses and music companies have: marketing channels. Marketing channels are huge, expensive to build, and expensive to maintain. But they're really the only barrier to entry in a lot of markets...but that's a big barrier.
How do you get your book noticed? Word of mouth? Internet newsgroups? Maybe you send free copies to book clubs or the local radio station?
Without the majors, your life will be tougher.
The companies that are succeeding are the ones that are trying to become marketing channels. Tidbits is one. google, of all things, is another. eBay is one. iTMS is one. Even O'Reilly is one - all the hot tech comes out in their books first.
The question is, how can you tell which companies are doing this? I don't think about it a lot, so I don't know the answer. It would be nice to hear other companies that are channels.
Languages are OSS for your brain. Anyone is free to contribute to them, expand them, specialize them toward some particular purpose and those changes are given freely back to the community. The community then automatically decides if those changes were beneficial or not and either adopts them or doesn't. For the english language alone there are dozens of distributions available that are all more or less interoperable. If your distro does something a little different than someone else's that doesn't mean either is right or wrong. Differences are bound to pop up, some exist for a reason, others are basically arbitrary. As someone who uses the distro you're criticizing, I'll just say that the alternative spelling you've suggested seems a little awkward to pronounce while the one we use flows easily.
Anyway, my point is that you are free to contribute to English or any other human language as much as you want but you must remember that you don't own any of them even if one of them happens to be named after your nationality.
her boobs were blowup? well they must have been underinflated when they came out during the superbowl.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200401# 149
However, e-books as I use and love 'em are a very different beast. I have a large library (>100MB) of stuff in Palm DOC format -- an open format, easily convertible to/from plain text. (This means I can edit the texts as needed to fix formatting, errors, convert to British English spellings, &c.) I keep them on my Psion 5mx -- a PDA that I already carry in my pocket anyway. I read them on its 640x240 backlit LCD, which I find easy enough on my eyes. I get them from various sources; legit ones include Fictionwise, which has a reasonable range of DRM-free stuff, though the biggest names are DRM-only; author's web sites Gutenberg; Baen Books; and various others.
The advantages are numerous: I always have reading material, without having to carry a book around with me, so when I find myself sitting in trains or in the Chinese take-away, the time's never wasted. I always have reference material to refer to (dictionaries, 3 Bible translations, the Jargon File, you name it -- shortly to include a full cut of Wikipedia), and can quote straight from my favourite books. I don't need to faff around with bookmarks. I can read in bed with the lights out. I have backups. I don't need to buy any more bookcases (and I've got enough already...) And so on. I'm not saying this would be right for you; but it certainly works for people like the grandparent poster and me.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
As mentioned in slashdot before, Baen publishing puts out Webscriptions and also gives away ebooks for free on the net and they also provide a CD in several of their books with a large number of novels included. All of the free ebooks in the free library and on CD can be shared but not sold.
Here are several ISO images of Baen's free science fictional goodness, please leave up your bittorrent client for others to share.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The FM band in 88.1 through 91.9 MHz in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has two Christian stations (one operated by a university), one NPR classical station, and one NPR talk radio station. Unlike many towns, we don't have secular college radio.
I think that what the TidBITS people are doing with ebooks is a good example of what a lot of traditional publishers are missing out on. There have been a number of publishers that have made articles freely accessible online and tried to sell banner advertising. When that doesn't work out, they simply make their articles "subscriber only," which shrinks their online audience greatly (and sinks search engine rankings since nobody is motivated to link to inaccessible articles) and eliminates the possibility of making "add on" revenue producers like ebooks impractical.
For example, an industry publication could make articles freely accessible to bring in traffic and then earn revenue through ebooks, vendor directory lisings, "ask the expert" services, RFP services, industry reports, forum subscriptions, etc. Some publications have dabbled in such things, and some such efforts will inevitably fail, but it seems that many publications don't even try to branch beyond their print approach of simply selling ads.
Under this analogy, wouldn't female dogging about deviations from an English "standard" correspond to female dogging about deviations from specifications such as Single UNIX, LSB, or GNOME HIG?
a small (whatever size is needed I mean) writers co-op might work, they all chip in and get one machine for those various small runs. It's a possibility anyway.
To me it's like distros, I can't afford full price ones, and I can't download being on dialup, so the clone copy/sellers hit the sweet spot with me at price and convenience. Books might be a similar deal for a lot of people. I prefer dead trees myself for reading, but I can get by with digital on the screen, but it just doesn't feel the same and isn't as comfortable. A lot of people are just going to be incredibly cheap about it and always try to find comopletely free, but enough would be willing to pay reasonable fees. To me,cash wise were I the producer of the book or software or music or video, and needed some coin for it, reasonable and some is better than unreasonable and none.
20,000 copies at $7.5 (it mentions $5 or $10), that's $150,000. 50% royalties, so the publisher keeps $75,000.
After expenses that's not even much for the publisher to pay himself a decent salary. So maybe profitable, but hardly an example of a booming business.
I've been running my own online publishing service since December 2002. Weekly e-mail chess training newsletters in html/pdf. It's been quite successful as a one-man show. I don't use any DRM and encourage subscribers to share with friends. Going on the "pixels are cheap" formula I priced things very low. Apart from the "lemonade game" aspect of having more subscribers with a lower price vs fewer paying more, having more happy subscribers works on word of mouth.
/. crowd.
I could put bugs in the html and DRM into the PDF to see who is forwarding the newsletters to a dozen friends, but all you do is force people to take more care with their piracy. Since you'll never stop a determined pirate, why hassle everyone else? I'm sure this is "Doh!" material for the
One way to fight e-book piracy is to customize the books for the customer. This makes the books less attractive to pass on.
:^)
My company ImageJester personalizes its e-books with the names and faces of people. Folks can even read the customized e-books online for free, and high-quality PDF files can be purchased and printed on home color printers.
This busines model works for picture books for children, but perhaps a customized technical manual for an operating system doesn't have quite the same appeal.
Matthew Clark
pdf is good for many things. and with adobe's tagged pdf's that's ok but for small files/zines like phrack and 2600, txt is ok. If you could include in the tagged pdf the code in the actual "example.cpp" and have tiff schematics that would seriously be awesome.
not sure if it'll change, but i'd pay for the 2600 one. and maybe phrack if they substantially changed their format to include binaries, code and images that were embedded into the document.
just perhaps
I mean, I highly doubt online publishing is even worth the effort. You would need to do so much advertising and get so much television publicity that it would just be more worth it to be invited to a real book signing. Maybe publishing both real books and online books may be worth it, but not going online only.
Just a note for those not inclined to do the math. There are 2 $10 books and 7 $5 books for an average of $6.111 per book. The Wired article states that roughly 20,000 have been sold. If we assume that every book sold equally, which we know to be false but will accept for the purposes of this estimate, that's $122,222.22 in revenue. 50%, or $61,111.11, of which goes to the authors. There are 9 books. If we stick by our earlier assumption that's $6,790.12 for the author per book. Now we could add in what we do know about "Upgrading to Panther," but it would distribute evenly anyway. I know what you're thinking, and no I do not get outside much.
50% royalty is damn good for publishing business. Anyone who buys paper books pays 95% to publishers, printers, salesmen and hordes of managers around.
Actually, Surfers Serials has long been supplanted by the (OSX app) Serial Box. Get with the times!
Well, don't read the Take Control books on your PDA if you don't want to. They're in PDF format so you can read them on your desktop or print them out. A key advantage to them is their short publishing cycle- they're often updated and relevant. And buddy, these books may only be 50-150pgs but aren't not skimpy on the info. Finding the same info on Google will take your quite a few hours, I guarantee it. I guess if a half-dozen hours is not worth $5-10 to ya, knock yourself out.
Before you dump on them too much, subscribe to the TidBITS mailing list itself and you can get an idea of what the books will be like. I have been on the list for well over a decade and out of all the numerous mailing lists I've been on, this one is the one that always gets read. The articles are useful, very well-written and in-depth on the topics they cover: this is why TidBITS is one of the longest-running lists on the internet. It's actually useful.
If I could buy books cheaper in an electronic format I would have about a 1000 books by now. I'm addicted to books but I don't have the space for them. I have purchased e-books but I have not been too impressed with the readers. I wish you could read MS reader books in Adobe and Word just for general versatility.
Losers whine about doing their best
Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen!
$10 for an 89 page book that promises this: You'll discover smart ways to address outgoing mail, send and receive attachments successfully, and view incoming mail? I don't think so.
Another interesting publishing model is Sourcebeat. Not self-publishing, but a publisher where new online editions are released each month, to keep up with open source projects as they develop.
Nice to see these new models by people who "get it".
These are user manuals. Books in digital formats will not succeed until they begin to use available enhancements.
i.e. "He heard an eerie sound." {cue(eeriesound.midi)}
I suspect that eventually digital books will become something half way between print and movies, rather like the radio dramas of old.
Red Hat co-founder Bob Young's current venture is lulu.com. They are geared to print on demand self publishing.
I've not noticed that trend myself, but if there is a pattern, then perhaps it has something to do with experience on a couple of fronts. .
For instance, low UID users automatically have at least 5 years of on-line experience by virtue of the fact that low UID's on
Also, those who were 'in the know' then, had enough world-savvy to get on board with
Age and experience will always trump youth and beauty. Not that this says much about the
It'll be interesting to see the day when the one millionth UiD is reached! At about 100,000 new users per year, it should happen around the end of 2006, assuming the internet doesn't alter significantly between now and then.
-FL
The company i work for www.netaim.info
as been doing this for ages. Its called information marketing on the web and it works.
Let them share books with friends, and the friends in turn buy more books from you. no one wants to be restricted woth drm.
Imagine, for instance, a 50-page book on regular expression pattern matching for Mac OS X users.
Oh be still my beating heart.
Da Blog
RPG publishers are doing this at an alarming rate.
PDF publishing is popular not only with small houses, but with a couple established industry leaders (Monte Cook dual publishes his supplements for D&D).
There are several sites dedicated to selling these (I'm not going to pimp one here). But there is a battle between DRM and non-DRM now as a new site opened up recently with DRM.
There is some argument in the community about p2p distribution of these pdfs, because it is not legal. But people are not sure if it helps or hurts legitimate sales.
Anyway, it may be an interesting bell weather for other PDF publishers.
I followed the link to "Mr. SCO Man" Rob Enderle's FUD and lies, and his one comment that made any sense: namely that the biggest weapon against open source is the vast amount of time that people spend reading and replying to slashdot posts instead of DOING SOMETHING USEFUL for the larger community.
/dev/null
This Slashdot thread and many replies are genuinely useful and enlightening. Cheers to michael and adam and all the insightful readers and commenters. You are genuinely adding value.
Now, in order to practice what I preacn ( showing disdain for PhB's ) I notice that I don't have time right now to read all the comments, but I've saved the flat listings as HTML and will later on copy them to a single Mozilla composer page, and print as PS, later converting to PDF. AS AN EBOOK OF SORTS!!
So, Mozilla doesn't quite understand how to print to pdf, so here's my "distill" script for the ps files. Hasn't failed me yet.
distill
#!/bin/csh
foreach file ($*)
set outfile = `echo $file | sed -e 's/.ps$/.pdf/' `
echo "$file -> $outfile"
gs -dNOPAUSE -q -sOutputFile=$outfile -sDEVICE=pdfwrite $file &
end
Yes, kiddies, I predate BASH, so it's a csn script. Not needed on a mac. Proof left to reader.
HAPPY DISTILLING
Yet another example of some zealous cub reporter extrapolating a general rule from a single instance.
Statistically, it's nearly impossible to make money as a traditionally-publishing writer. Ask your favorite publishing editor about the "slush pile". But in spite of this, now Wired News is going to convince me that a minority subdivision of this group, who publishes in a medium where, as far as distribution rights control goes, they necessarily don't have any, has a snowball's chance in hell of making money... all based on the existence of one entity doing so. They may as well run a piece on why playing the lottery is a smart idea, focusing on a past winner as "evidence".
How about if instead of diligently seeking out successes Wired just picked some online-selling writers at random? Heh, heh.
I have been posting to
Sounds to me like you are hung up to some degree because you just did say all of that stuff.
The AC poster is a whole other type of animal! Registered users, by virtue of registering do indeed attach a level of importance to their names and 'histories', as it were. I know I do. This certainly carries with it a level of vanity. --But then I've always squinted rather at the concept of vanity being a sin in the biblical sense; seems suspiciously like yet another way of controlling people and stopping them from trying to excel and find their light.
--That's 'Vanity' in the sense of striving to be a unique individual who has found their sovereignty (what gall!) and doesn't particularly want to die on some cross a good little flock member who was miserable through life because they didn't want to 'offend' anybody by standing up and speaking out for the things they believe in. --Or doing the things they believed were right and special. There are a lot of people out there who are miserable because they did what they were told rather than listen to the inner voice. Joseph Campbell called it, "Following Your Bliss," and it seems to me that most people have been beaten down to the point where they are too terrified to do this. This isn't any way to run a planet!
Of course, there are negative ways of utilizing any sort of energy. This is why I don't judge the post on the UiD number, (or on an AC marker), but on the content. But I won't let this stop me from considering the why's and wherefor's of a pattern if somebody brings it up and I've never really noticed or thought on it before. Thinking is fun, after all!
-FL
I'm still puzzling over this comment that keeps coming up again and again. I bought my current Macintosh in 1999. It is running the current Apple operating system. I did max out the RAM and I did get a faster processor for my box but that was all planned when I purchased it. I figure to get a solid five to six years out of my one Macintosh and that is a lot more life than you get out of a pee cee -- assuming you want to run current software.
Apple computers are easier to use and learn. There are costs associated with that.
I, for one, think that what Real is doing is just fine, though it is probably wrong to sell something at a loss in order to gain market share. I would have been happy to see an agreement between Real and Apple to increase the available titles on the iTunes Music Store. I find it wholly and completely unsurprising that Real's music download site does not work with Macintosh computers. Their other software requires a lot more out of a Power PC Processor than it does out of an Intel processor and the Power PC Processor has more capacity to do the kind of work I would expect of a video codec (or two or three) and Real tends to update Apple-compatible software as an afterthought.
Or could it be that they don't want a judge to pronounce summary judgement against them by supporting Macintosh with their music store...
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
What you could do if you wanted to protect your online version, would be to either
a) sell it seperately, and
b) sell it as part of the book in print - have it as a free-download "alternative" for those of us who would rather read it on our PDAs or whatever.
Have like... a sticker inside the cover of each book with a number you use to download the book. When you first download the book, you put a 'password' of sorts on the book (3-4 digits or whatever, and user generated, rather than algorithm - this way its harder to electronically generate a combination that will work with the book) so that its still quick to open, but means that there is some form of protection on there, in case someone acquires themselves an illegitimate copy.
of course, this method won't necessarily stop piracy altogether - there is not much that will - and there would probably be little to stop someone from writing a brute force thing to crack the combination (4 tries and they're out for good without re-setting the code again using the same software/product id combo?)...
however, it probably wouldn't be worth the time for someone to write a program like that for breaking the password on a $10 ebook - would I be right in saying that there seems to be fewer cracks around for $10-30 software than there is for $50 to $5000 software?
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
dictionary.com lists "titbit" as the variant. Had you asked me, I'd have guessed that "titbit" might be an Anglicism, but OTOH, the quote dictionary.com gives for "tidbit" is from Sir Alec Guinness, who I (admittedly an American) would think very English indeed.