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."

Comments

Good thing you've mentioned them on Slashdot

[melted]

Now these books will appear on every god damn P2P network out there.

Re:Good thing you've mentioned them on Slashdot

[Synesthesiatic]

Now these books will appear on every god damn P2P network out there.

For those too lazy to RTFA: None of the books has any kind of copy protection, though Adobe's PDF format contains various digital-rights management mechanisms. "It's not worth doing it all, because it just causes problems," Engst said.
...Engst asks his customers to treat the books as they would physical books: Feel free to share with a couple of friends, but don't post them on the Net. Engst has been aware of no abuse, and none of the books has shown up on file-sharing networks.

Now admittedly I download now and then, but in this instance we've got a content producer that is:
- Small and independent
- Compensating writers fairly
- Charging a very reasonable price
- Choosing not to use DRM, despite having the option to do so, and even *gasp* encouraging people to share with their friends.

I have nothing but contempt for someone that would violate the copyright on this. After all, isn't this the direction the Slashthink wants the music industry to take?

Re:Good thing you've mentioned them on Slashdot

[TyrranzzX]

But the content's got to be worth it ;). We've got this new tech that can copy things all over and circulate ideas like wildfire, yet money always gets in the way because writers have got to eat.

I think they'd make more money by providing the books for the cost of download ($2 or $3 a e-book) and then offering exclusive paperbacks/hardbacks to people who want them at $20 or $30 a pop, or they can offer books that'll last forever for mroe. After a year, they begin throwing books up free to download with advertisements in the front and back for paperbacks. The good books will gross a lot of sales for paperbacks, as the demand for them is still there. If I had the money I'd certainly buy or print a number of books I have, and a few (scabbed wings of abadon, www.rantradio.ca for that one) I *REALLY* want a paperback of, not only because the book is so damn kewl, but so I can loan it to friends.

An electronic medium can is only as good as it's medium, but a good book can last years. Frankly, without DRM authors will be doomed, and with DRM people will be doomed since multinationals will seek to lisence everything. I can't really see any middleground right now. People really can't make money selling intangible objects like data because once data is created it can be copied at nearly no cost. They can make money at selling tangible objects, like paperbacks, however.

Effects of free online publishing?

[oostevo]

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.

Re:American stupidity or political correctness ?

[GeekBird]

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...

Doesn't Always Work

[oasis3582]

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.

See the story http://slashdot.org/features/00/11/30/1238204.shtm l

Re:Yes, but

[Monkelectric]

You're gonna get EATEN alive by the mods. But you hit the nail on the head. I've lost a lot of mod points myself trying to explain to people,that the only reason Apple can do the things it does is because there is a legion of fanboys willing to purchase whatever stupid idea steve jobs dreams up at a 30% markup. Apple is a *BRAND* like Nike. For my money I'd rather wear my insanely comfortable TX Traction shoes which cost 39.99 instead of Nike's which cost 3x as much. Same damn thing with my computer. My identity is not my brand of computer.

IPOD? Had it back when it was called the Archos Jukebox, nobody cared. Itunes? Had it when it was called "eMusic.com" Nobody praised emusic or archos as visionaries. I wasn't a cosmopolitan hipster for having these things.

Caveat Emptor

[PingPongBoy]

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.

Re:American stupidity or political correctness ?

[Okonomiyaki]

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.

Re:American stupidity or political correctness ?

[tepples]

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?

Piracy issues? Customize the products!

[msclark]

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

It might not pay that well due to scale but

[agristin]

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.