Oolite Bulletins

drew wrote:

My long term strategy would have a mix of less serious books available for free, with my 'proper' books only available in the published arena, with perhaps the first chapter available online....

Drew, as I'm also trying my hand at selling digital goods online, I'd love to know how well your strategy works.

Off-topic aside: It's funny. Ask somebody to name a search engine, and the first thing that will come out of most people's mouths is "Google". Auction site? eBay. Electronic payments? Paypal. Online bookstore? Amazon.

And yet ask them the name of an online 'digital goods' store and most people would go blank. I suppose that the nearest one could get to such a thing would be 'iTunes' - but I don't think there are many eBooks there. It just surprises me that there isn't a single, well-known, digital-download version of Amazon.

Publishers in general are tying themselves in knots over digital downloads. In the US, Amazon launched the "Kindle" ebook reader, using a proprietary file format which Amazon are trying to keep a chokehold on.

There's something odd about a lot of publishers: a hell of a lot of them don't seem to be terribly confident in the future of printed books: real, old-fashioned books printed on squashed dead tree. I went through this in the 1990s, watching various publishers run off after CD-ROMs shouting "the book is dead!" and rapidly going bust making shiny little coasters that nobody wanted...

True ebooks are a different matter, to an extent: but until someone can come up with a good, robust ebook reader with a long battery life that you can knock about the place and read in the bath, for no more than £30 or £40 tops (the Kindle is, I think, somewhere over $300) they're never going to make more than the smallest little dent in traditional book sales. Even if and when such technology is available the printed book will, I think, remain a standard part of our society. It's a technology with 2,000 years of refinement behind it, it's immune from sudden changes in format or platform (if you don't count language drift) and people seem to like it.

With this in mind I think the idea of offering a couple of chapters for free makes a lot of sense -- particularly if the finished book is of good physical quality. That's something else I think we'll see more of, in these days of ever-larger discounts being demanded by Amazon and other wholesalers (50% and up: 40%+ even for single copies -- eech!): more expensive, and more expensively-produced books that trade on their physical attractions. For a 10% increase in production price you can quite feasibly charge 50% extra on the cover price, which means that, even after Amazon have taken their pound-and-a-half-and-a-bit-more-bend-over of flesh there's still some profit left over for the publisher...

As for selling digital goods online, personally I think shareware is the best model to follow. If you ask people to pay you a reasonable amount of money for using something they find useful/enjoyable, I think most will cough up -- if only in the hope that you might do the same thing again.

I don't *know* this, and I've done no research at all -- it's just a gut feeling (and almost certainly the success or failure rates will vary according to the product and the market). Digital copy protection never seems to work, and is just an invitation to crackers. Unless you're really pouring a lot of money in at the beginning then I think just asking nicely and trusting to most people's better natures, and enlightened self-interest, is probably the best bet. It's certainly the cheapest and easiest.

For an interesting perspective from a publisher, see Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution by Tim O’Reilly. Oh, and this.

Disembodied wrote:

...but until someone can come up with a good, robust ebook reader with a long battery life that you can knock about the place and read in the bath, for no more than £30 or £40 tops (the Kindle is, I think, somewhere over $300) they're never going to make more than the smallest little dent in traditional book sales.

I have to agree. When I think of eBook readers, I think of those futuristic flat tablets that Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard is given when he asks for a written report on something. Not a Kindle.

@Ahruman - thanks for the O'Reilly links, they were really well thought out and very informative.

Oho! Interesting! I like this bit in particular:

Why would you pay for a song that you could get for free? For the same reason that you will buy a book that you could borrow from the public library or buy a DVD of a movie that you could watch on television or rent for the weekend. Convenience, ease-of-use, selection, ability to find what you want, and for enthusiasts, the sheer pleasure of owning something you treasure.

This looks like it could be very useful for me in my own job... Cheers, Ahruman!

JohnnyBoy wrote:

I have to agree. When I think of eBook readers, I think of those futuristic flat tablets that Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard is given when he asks for a written report on something. Not a Kindle.

Apparently, I'm trying to describe a 'PADD': http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/PADD

Somebody's already tried to create one using a Nokia thingy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXBPjLdJnU

Just as current mobile phones make original Star Trek communicators look laughably clunky, PADDs have in many respects been surpassed by current technology and near-future technology. An iPod touch provides a better physical interface¹ that’s a third of the thickness of the PADD props, and will become thinner (and have better viewing angles) with OLEDs. Making them bigger would require little to no extra thickness. To be a real competitor to a book, though, you’d need a high-contrast black-on-white reflective display (i.e., no backlight) with at least 200 pixels per inch. Less of a bezel around the screen would be good. And preferably a casing that doesn’t feel warm or sticky after hours of use…

As for the Nokia thing… when did you ever see a stylus on Star Trek? :-)

¹Okuda’s designs are very decorative, but I wouldn’t let him near actual UI design.

One of the first things I install on any mobile phone I own is an ebook reader, whether it be a plain text reader or a PDF reader.

My current mobile, the Nokia 6110 (Symbian Series 60), has a reader called QReader on it which reads plain text files. It also comes preinstalled with a PDF reader and a Word document reader, so I can pretty much read any ebook you can find! You can get converters for the other formats too, so there you have it - nowadays the humble mobile phone can do everything a PADD could do. Now with mobile internet you even have the connectivity to the internet providing information from anywhere in the world. That's even better than the PADD, since it could only access the local starship's computer banks!

My previous phone was a simple java applet one (Nokia 6280, Series 40 OS) but you could still get book readers and so on for it.

JohnnyBoy wrote:

It just surprises me that there isn't a single, well-known, digital-download version of Amazon.

...and guess what? I'm not alone: http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_ch ... sales.html

Here's one for DaddyHoggy. I've found some excerpts from On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall on this webpage.

Thank ye kindly!

Wow! I didn't know you could get Charlie Stross's stuff on-line, I read all his stuff in print from the library.
Anyone who likes Charles Stross (and Anyone who is a reader on this forum is bound to) will also like the work of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_MacLeod.

Also Greg Egan is probably my favourite SF author, he has some work on-line here:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/

Charles Stross's short story "A Colder War" is available free online here. If you've not read it, it's his first go at SF-ising Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and it's a good read... It's the progenitor of his later (very funny) "Laundry" stories, published in The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue.

I'd like to add my own endorsement of Ensa's recommendations of Ken MacLeod (the "Fall Revolution" books are my personal favourites) and Greg Egan, too...

Edit: Actually, there is a whole wheen of other SF, fantasy and horror short fiction available for free on Infinityplus – well worth browsing around in!

Ahruman wrote:

As for the Nokia thing… when did you ever see a stylus on Star Trek?

Sorry, just noticed this comment. I remember in the first season of TOS when the Captain used to sign the ship's log (that the yeoman handed to him) with a stylus.

Next Gen though, stylus schmylus. Voice command, baby!

@Drew (if you're still here... ) - I found a free eBook that explains how to make money from blogging. I know that your internet business isn't based on a blog, but there's some useful making-money-from-the-web information in there anyway.

Go to Tony Shepherd's Blog, click on the tab marked "Free" and download the eBook called "Blog Your Wage". I read it and couldn't believe that such good info was being given away.