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Internet Publishing Can Pay Off

Posted by michael on from the two-bits dept.

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."

6 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Good thing you've mentioned them on Slashdot by melted · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Good thing you've mentioned them on Slashdot by Synesthesiatic · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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?

  2. Effects of free online publishing? by oostevo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...
  3. Doesn't Always Work by oasis3582 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  4. Re:American stupidity or political correctness ? by Okonomiyaki · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Piracy issues? Customize the products! by msclark · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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