Interesting results. Thanks for sharing them!
Why is S3 so important for file distribution? Couldn't you do about the same with some cheap shared hosting?
So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
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Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#22I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org . Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as…
> You don't get a tangible good that you can give specific value to.
Some various problems with eBooks are that 1) you can't resell it, 2) they're difficult to loan to people, or 3) difficult to leave lying around in the office for people to peruse.
That said, I think it's a very, very interesting space and am working on a product myself: http://www.liberwriter.com - I'll hopefully do a 'show HN' in a few days.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#23For a highly successful alternative to giving away the PDF, you can read my interview with Michael Hartl: http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/09/interview-with-michael-...
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#24Interesting results. Thanks for sharing them! Why is S3 so important for file distribution? Couldn't you do about the same with some cheap shared hosting?
Content Delivery Networks offer good scaling opportunities. In my limited experience, pricing of bandwidth and storage space scales better with S3 than most shared hosting alternatives. Amazon's CDN also takes care of the actual resource scaling for you, whereas shared hosting would max out.
With S3: if nobody turns up, you just pay storage for the PDF (less than pennies, $.14 per GB); if everybody turns up, Amazon handle the extra load and you pay a proportional amount in bandwidth fees.
With shared hosting: if nobody turns up, your hosting fee remains the same size (pounds or dollars); if everybody turns up, the shared host falls over and the hosting company invokes some clause in their contract with you to force you to host with S3 instead.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#25I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org . Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as…
My problem with buying books, both printed and ebooks, related to programming something in a specific version, is that I know that in a few months the code in the book will be outdated.
Give me a price for the current book including updates in the future and I would gladly pay a bit extra.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#26I think that giving the PDF for free was a mistake. I would sell the PDF for the same price as print (or slightly cheaper) and try 2 other ways for generating publicity/traffic. 1. Serialize the book as blog post i.e. post each self-contained part as spaced blog posts, with a link to buy the whole PDF at the end of each post. 2. Publish the whole book as html, but at any given time only part of the book would be avai…
I suppose if he were to sell the PDF, it would automatically turn his "encourag[ing] redistribut[ing] the PDF, including via BitTorrent" into piracy. If you see piracy as a necessary evil, you might grumble at that; if, like Minecraft's creator, you see piracy as a nullity:
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-sa...
and say "there's no such thing as a lost sale", then you might not care in the slightest. But the nature of the ecosystem surrounding your book will inevitably change: as someone said elsewhere in this thread, you can't loan an eBook; a solution to that would be sending someone the PDF, but you've just turned them into a pirate.
There's no easy solution. Upselling blogposts might be a better idea; even then, it would be good to have figures.
An even more radical alternative would have been Mark Pilgrim's approach to Dive Into Python. You could give your book a Creative Commons licence and expect people to copy and remix it:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point
but then Pilgrim admits he's not in it for the money, so in the absence of reliable financials: who knows?
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#27I think that giving the PDF for free was a mistake. I would sell the PDF for the same price as print (or slightly cheaper) and try 2 other ways for generating publicity/traffic. 1. Serialize the book as blog post i.e. post each self-contained part as spaced blog posts, with a link to buy the whole PDF at the end of each post. 2. Publish the whole book as html, but at any given time only part of the book would be avai…
I suppose if he were to sell the PDF, it would automatically turn his "encourag[ing] redistribut[ing] the PDF, including via BitTorrent" into piracy. If you see piracy as a necessary evil, you might grumble at that; if, like Minecraft's creator, you see piracy as a nullity: http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-sa... and say "there's no such thing as a lost sale", then you might not care in the sl…
If you publish on Kindle or Nook, you actually can loan an ebook. Both platforms allow for lending.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#28I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org . Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as…
Just as a personal datapoint. Personally I know that my impulse buy limit for ebooks is up to 15$, over that I hesitate, spend a lot time thinking and so on. For books my impulse buy limit is around 25$ but that's because I can resell it if I don't like it and because while I enjoy reading fiction as ebooks, I prefer paperback for technical content.
Another point where I'm a bit irrational, if I find out that an ebook had a sale for a substantially lower price than now (like the 15$ sale for the "authoring ebooks" book), I'm much less likely to want to buy it at full price because then I feel cheated... It's the same thing for Iphone Apps and so on...
I'm not sure if there are many people like me, it's a bit irrational but it's something that might be a good idea to take into account before doing a sale... By doing a sale you fix the value of your product in the mind of the customer to the price of the sale.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet) People make a lot of money selling eBooks, including to programmers. (Indeed, the recent change in the market is that thanks to the Kindle you can actually do well selling books which don't cost ~$50 and/or fiction.) Ask Amy Hoy, who cowrote a fairly successful one with her husband about JS performance. Your problem is not your pricing. Your problem is that your marketing doe…
Trust me, I know people are buying (I've made nearly as much as or more than Amy off my eBooks other than the authoring one). The volume for something that sells well isn't the issue. It's really that people don't want to pay as much for eBooks as one would hope/think. Part of the problem is the "I don't get something tangible for my money." Never mind you're receiving a lot of, you know, information or anything. Peo…
It's a culture issue that's difficult to work around.
Haters gonna hate. Ignore em.
Re: So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
#30I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org . Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as…
As a data point: I'm reluctant to pay too much for ebooks, because they have no resale value . There are plenty of print books that I've happily spent $30-100 for, because I know that I can resell them for most of the cost (typically $5 less, at most) if I don't consider them worth keeping. Arguably, this makes their effective cost more like $5-10, give or take - mostly shipping. I'm quite willing to pay more for boo…
Who pays (sticker - $5) for a used book? Add the shipping cost and you're more expensive than a new one! Plus, what kind of book do you buy that have resale value? They surely aren't programming/IT books, because those become worthless after 3 years or so.