Books vs "e-books" ?
I've been thinking about something for a while, and to be honest, still haven't reached any firm conclusions: what to think about self-published "e-books"? I'm curious to hear your opinions.
For instance:
- http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
- http://www.railsupgradehandbook.com/
- http://createyourproglang.com/
These are all: electronic, in that they aren't distributed as real, paper books, have no ISBN number, and are generally only available via the author's web site (you won't find them on Amazon.com). They aren't simply on-line, PDF versions of real books.
They're certainly a departure from the traditional model of having a publisher, editor, and real, physical books that could be purchased from book stores. They don't appear to have been through any kind of formal editing or quality control process. The prices seem to differ quite a bit; the first one is $19, the second one is $12, and the last one is $30.77.
For the authors, the appeal is obvious: they get to keep all of the money, and don't have to fool around with a lot of "process".
Consumers, on the other hand, have to consider different aspects: with a "real book", the bureacracy and process exist to guarantee some minimum standards of quality. If you buy an O'Reilly book, you know that it's probably like many of the other books they sell: perhaps it won't stand the test of time like something written by Knuth, but it'll be a pretty good guide to the technology it describes, most likely be someone who is indeed an expert in that area. If I buy some random PDF on the internet, it may come from someone who really knows their stuff, or it may be junk. On the other hand, were this market to grow, theoretically prices could come down. Since the people who are authoring the book don't have to fool around with editing, printing, and so on, and get to keep all the money themselves, they could in theory keep their prices significantly lower than someone creating a more 'traditional' book with a lot of overhead. That is, of course, if the book is one where there is competition in its niche. Right now a lot of these books that pop up on my radar are written by domain experts. However, what's to prevent a lot of people from jumping in and attempting to make a quick buck with a flashy looking web site? Buying books based only on reputation? That might lead to people who are really good authors, but perhaps not well known as "doers" (they didn't invent the technology in question) being left out in the cold. Also, there is something of an unknown quantity about "pdf books". For instance, after raking in a bunch of cash with theirs, 37signals put it on their web site, completely for free. That had to leave the guy who bought it the day before it went free feeling like a bit of a chump. At least with a 'real book', even if the contents are posted on the internet, you have a physical object that belongs to you. I wonder how bad piracy is, and how bad it might be were these to become more popular? Another thing worth noting is that, via services like Lulu.com, it *is* possible to print these out.
In any case, I think things are likely to change with time, as we aren't dealing with a static situation, but rather one where a changing landscape maylead to different outcomes, as the key variables... vary.
I am honestly unsure of what to make of this development. How do you see the market for "home brewed" pdf ebooks evolving?
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about {{count}} hours later:
I have been doing this for six years now, but not in the same way as 37signals - my shell tutorial (http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml) is freely available online and also as a PDF for $9.99.
Readers can assess the quality because the whole thing is online, and they can buy the PDF in a more convenient, offline format without adverts, separate HTML pages, etc if they want to.
As the tutorial itself has been online for 10 years, it has been read hundreds of thousands of times, and I have probably had about 100 emails pointing out errors - reducing in number as time goes on, I think there's been one correction in the past year. So in that sense, buyers do get a reviewed, edited, tested document.
I'm not going to get rich this way, but it pays for a couple of beers, and hopefully makes life a bit easier for people learning this essential interface to *nix OSes.
about {{count}} hours later:
traditional publishing has a gatekeeper to limit who can publish books, they also employ various professional services on the manuscripts like proofreaders, copy editor and typesetters.And lastly, some folks review books for the worth. If the PDF/online writers could employ these same professional services for their works and one could find a impartial service to review such content, that would go along way to helping consumers find the books they want. Lulu or similar might offer such a deal.
about {{count}} hours later:
Interesting post. On a side note, I found the text hard to read, and that's even w/ my young eyes ;-). I think it's because of the low contrast (#444 on #FAFAFA) and relatively small font size. This is using Chrome, though, and the font seemed a bit larger with Firefox for some reason.
about {{count}} hours later:
Your post made me think of Joe Konrath's post which I read some time ago, you might be interested in it also.
Having read it, I was pretty shocked to see the prices you quoted here. It's like the paper-book publishers up-in-arms about Amazon's $10 price point. They just don't seem to realize that charging what amounts to an arm and leg for something that can be reproduced for nothing is something that intelligent people tend to disapprove of. And if they'd set aside their sense of entitlement for just a moment, they might realize they're missing out on a ton of sales.
Also, having a quick scan of that post again it seems even Amazon takes 65% of Kindle sales (or at least of Joe Konrath's), better than his paper-book publisher's 75%, but still, pretty offensive that the actual creator gets the smaller share, moreso considering the ethereal nature of electronic data. So I say more power to the independent people selling their books themselves on their websites, even if they're crazy with the price.
{{count}} days later:
The current market for home-brewed pdf books is similar to what the home-brewed software market used to be like, when independent developers would post their programs (shareware and crippleware) to download sites.
Few made any money, and from a consumer's point of view, it was hard to know what was good and worth paying for.
That changed (at least in the mobile apps market) with the iPhone AppStore: there was now a central marketplace, which could be searched by popularity or reputation (reviews by other users), which made installing independent developer apps easy, and provided a way for developers to get paid.
We think the ebooks market is ready for a similar transformation, which is why our startup is building a marketplace for ebooks -- http://www.fifobooks.com/ -- where anyone can publish and get paid.
From a consumer's point of view, finding desirable content is easy, and downloading and installing ebooks to a Kindle or Nook is made simple.