Books in Beta Form

congaflum writes "The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently released the second beta of their upcoming book Agile Web Development with Rails. By releasing the book to the public in beta form, the authors are able to gather feedback about the books content from a larger audience that would normally be the case. Readers get to influence the direction on the books content by posting feedback to the publisher's website. And of course there's the benefit of simply getting to read the book early. Could beta-version books be a sign of future changes in the commercial publishing industry? And with the availability of things like print on demand these days, how about books that are much more frequently revised (why buy a year-old Edition 1 of something, if you can have Edition 1.1.18?)"

Comments

They probably thought about it long and hard

[3770]

With people having the electronic format available there's a few factors to consider:

1) There will be more word of mouth, so more people will hear about it
2) Some people will buy it because they read some of it and like the content but prefer the format of the book (so that they can read it in the bathroom maybe, what do i know).
3) Some people will read it and decide that they either don't like it, or that they are satisfied with just having the book in its electronic format.

What the publisher in this case is that item 1 and 2 will add more buyers than item 3 will cost them.

Paranoid College $tudent

[richdun]

Yeah, this may just be the paranoid college student in me, but why do I see this being taken advantage of for textbooks? It's bad enough they release a new version just when you're finally ready to sell the book back to your campus bookstore, but updating possibly even quicker, new editions may keep coming out mid-course.

If they only make you pay once for the beta and for the full version when it is ready, as this one appears to work, that's okay I guess, but this could get way out of hand.