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

[eggboard]

I wrote the file sharing book, so I'll respond to you directly. It's not an electronic pamphlet. It's over 100 pages of focused advice. It's $10 because that was the optimum price that allows us to sell a relatively small number of books (about 2,000 so far) while compensating me in a reasonable manner for the time it took to write it, and the ongoing time I spend in answering email and revising it. It's actually worked out perfectly.

The book isn't (as I noted in another Slashdot post), select this menu item, click start, next task. I explain how to modify Apache to set up WebDAV under Mac OS X. I have details on creating custom Samba shares. I explain the bugs in Apple's implementation of lukemftpd which prevents proper use of chroot and how to get around it.

Low-level topics these ain't if you've seen the book. This thread on Slashdot has given us a lot of good feedback, but the critique is all coming from people who are IMAGINING what's in the books, not actually looking at the site, downloading the free samples, and then responding.

The economics of publishing are really weird, too. The DVD Studio Pro book you bought for $20 gives a royalty of between $1.50 and $3 to the author or authors per copy sold. The book has to sell over 10,000 copies at that price and size to really make any money for the publisher. If the author worked alone, they might wind up making between $30 and $50 an hour for their time. Not bad at all, but not a massive return.

We're producing these niche -- not low-level -- books for intermediate users who need specific information and don't want to buy $40 and $50 exhaustive books. The exhaustive books are great for general reference, but my file sharing book has details that I was unable to find in any of the giant Panther books: they perversely don't have the space to cover every scenario in each topic because they have to cover EVERY topic.

Music

[macdaddy]

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.

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:Effects of free online publishing?

[bcrowell]

Baen has done it, and it worked great. Cory Doctorow has done it (I think his publisher is Tor), and it worked great. I've done it, and it worked great.

eBooks are great.

[g-to-the-o-to-the-g]

I personally love ebooks. I have a $100 Palm m500, which has a backlight, so I can read without having to worry about the lighting or turning the page. Not to mention, I can have 50 books on a SD card. Why more people haven't caught on, I don't know. My favourite part is laying in bed and reading until I fall asleep (which is convenient, seeing as the thing powers itself off eventually, and I don't have to worry about the lights).

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.

Because of the audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac users are used to paying for things. Software, shareware, etc. Linux users expect everything for free, and Windows users just pirate it.

Re:Doesn't Always Work

[bcrowell]

IIRC, sales were actually OK, but not as high as the target he'd set. It was a very atypical case anyway, because he was such a popular author. His books normally sold a lot of copies, and he expected to make a boatload of money off of each one. It's a whole different story for most authors. Most authors are only supplementing their income by writing books anyway.

It's also no secret that digital books can be a big failure if you choose the wrong model. Maybe his model (donate, or I'll stop writing chapters) was simply a bad one. Personally, I think it sounds like a huge hassle to have to pay the author periodically to read each chapter, after it's been so long that I've probably forgotten what happened in the last chapter.

Re:Yes, but

[lavaface]

I'm cheap. Well, poor. But I bought a Powerbook (with student loans : ) because video work on a PC blows. For many users a Mac is overpriced. But for folks that like a machine that offers a smooth user experience with well-designed apps bundled, it's a dream.

Re:ill choice

[eggboard]

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!)

Low cost, high volume

[migstradamus]

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.

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 /. crowd.

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