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.
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...
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. ;-)
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
I'm the author of two of these books and have been using a Mac since 1985. I'm not going to pump up my own effort, but I can tell you how much of these books arise specifically from the fact that we, as authors and experienced Mac users, couldn't find complete and/or accurate answers to the questions that the books address, nor could we find the comprehensive start to finish advice that we needed.
Our books aren't "here's menu A, here's menu B." The whole point is that they're not exhaustive, but they focus in on specific details. The books try to solve problems and to do it in finite space.
It would also be another thing if you could spend a few minutes and find the answer on Google for everything in the 50 to 100 pages in the books. But you can't. It might take you a few minutes per page to find what's in the book. So if you spent, say, 2 to 4 hours, you might save $5 to $10 -- if you could find the information.
My first book on file sharing took me about 60 hours to write on top of my experience with Unix (1994 to present), Linux (1997 to present), and Mac OS X (10.0.0 to present). The AirPort book that I just released a few weeks ago took less time in the first edition, but we commit to releasing updates with new and updated material--version 1.0 was about 90 pages; 1.1 (a free update for 1.0 book buyers) will be about 160.
Another interesting interaction with the ebooks is that we hear from readers and can practically immediately make changes. People who bought my AirPort books first version gave me great feedback. I incorporated almost all of it into new information for the 1.1 release, which all of these readers will get for free. I love that.
I hope this clears up a few of the issues. Almost all of the writers involved to date are freelancers, and it's really quite difficult to make a good living writing about using technology, which, I hope, helps other people. These ebooks make it financially possible for me to write books on topics that people are asking us for but that aren't available in a few minutes of Google searching, and that aren't cost effective for a print book, which has to sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies (depending on size) to be even a reasonable success.
Imagine, for instance, a 50-page book on regular expression pattern matching for Mac OS X users. It's a possibility, and would be highly useful. But you can't write a print book like that. (Although O'Reilly has a more generalized book on the topic in print!)
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Actually, what usually happens is that somebody with a six-figure UID will reply to a user with a four-figure UID with this:
"You must be new here."
Disclaimer: I have a high six-figure UID
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
Okay, I know you posted late at night, so you may be smoking crack, but $75,000 can be a significant amount to a small business. Expenses are, generally, negligible. I know their payment processor takes 10%-15%, and beyond that perhaps someone needs to maintain the sub-section of the site dedicated to these books. It's only a side section of TidBITS, and $75,000 for (almost) nothing isn't to be sniffed at!
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
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.