October 21, 22:58
My delight in seeing the Pragmatic Programmers publish their first two tomes of the Pragmatic Starter Kit is three-fold. First, as a regular consumer of technical books, it's great to be able to read more book-length material from Andy and Dave. Second, I was able to pick the first of the books at a $20 steal with instant delivery in my favorite format (PDF).
Third, and the main topic of this post, it represented a tangible success in my ongoing evangelism to convince publishers of technical books to supplement their paper versions with DRM-free ebooks.
I meet Dave Thomas at JAOO in Aarhus about a month ago. Upon hearing about Andy and his imminent release of two new books, I immediately launched a passionate plea for them to consider doing ebooks as well. I told him how expensive it was to buy American books in Europe and about the full-on ebook push at Manning. He listened patiently and interested.
After JAOO, I send Dave a reiteration of my arguments, to which he responded:
You'll be interested to know that your arguments at JAOO changed my mind about e-books; we're now going to be offering an electronic version of both the pragmatic starter kit books alongside the conventional paper copy.
And now, just a month after, you can buy both Pragmatic Version Control (which I already got) and Pragmatic Unit Testing as unrestricted, DRM-free PDF ebooks for just $20 a piece.
The arguments that I used in part to persuade him were split into two (and a half) categories:
Reasons for offering ebooks
- Much higher marginal profit: I'm told that a standard tech book does 10K units. A successful one does 25K. So at a royalty rate of 10% and a retail price of $40, you stand to earn between $40,000 and $100,000.
Let's work those numbers for an ebook arrangement where you sell the book at half price ($20), but reap a 90% cut instead of 10%. That means you only have to sell 2222 copies instead of 10,000 to earn $40,000 and 5555 copies to earn $100,000.
In marginal terms, that's a revenue of $18 per book instead of $4.
That's an interesting proposition in itself, but it gets much better if you can do a co-publishing arrangement where you do both ebook and dead-tree edition. The publisher will perhaps cry about cannibalizing, but on your end each ebook has to destroy 5 paper sales to be a rotten deal.
- Shorter performance feedback cycle: Is it six months it takes for royalties on new books to trickle in? With ebooks you get instant feedback on how the book is going to do. That'll allow you to take the necessary measures of increasing marketing efforts or going after specific markets when you see what sticks.
- Larger appeal for everyone outside the US: Since publishing in Europe is often lagging three to six months behind the US, you're much more relevant to buyers there when you're instantly available. You also don't have to worry as much about whether the book is getting proper exposure at local bookshops here.
Reasons for buying ebooks
- Read on alternative devices: I've read ebooks on my Nokia 3650 phone, the desktop iMac, my iBook laptop, and printed chapters out to read on the bus. This is the huge advantage of often formats, like PDF, which makes it really easy to use as you see fit. Whereas the closed ebook formats of yesterday always required specialized (and often crappy) readers that wouldn't work on Macs, or Linux, or my phone, and didn't want to spit out paper versions.
No wonder the earlier ebook formats failed when they stripped most of the interesting aspects of having a book in a digital format in the first place.
- Instant delivery: When I know there's a two-week wait on getting a book I order online, I'm much more likely to put off that purchase decision. My Amazon Wish List tells that tale. Whereas the ebook promise of instant delivery heralds a return to impulse buying. See something you like? It's a single click to get it. Having trouble setting up CVS? High quality information is $20 away.
I know for a fact that Manning has sold me on many books that would otherwise have ended up on my wish list or forgotten all together.
- Much faster searching: Good searching extends the lifetime of your book immensely. I've got a wall full good programming books, but the look-up cost of finding the book on my shelf, bringing it to the computer, and looking stuff up is so high that I rarely do. I'm much more inclined to search Google for lower quality information that doesn't tax me this look-up cost than I am to pay the look-up cost and get the high quality information.
Ebooks are great for searching. Especially with the new Preview program in OS X Panther. That thing is almost instant.
- Copy'paste code directly from the book: For technical books that have code in them, it's much easier to copy'n'paste that straight out of there instead of typing it in or getting a package with all the source code for the book. This is especially also valid for books that talk about configurations, which is something that's rarely included in a source distribution.
Other ideas for selling ebooks
- Offer a reasonable unlimited site-license: A lot of companies would like to heighten the knowledge level of their employees and the good ones keep a central library that you can check-out books from. But that library likely only has a single copy of each book and their invariantly checked out already.
Since there's no marginal costs to selling a ebook, a site-license scheme makes good sense. The company would only have bought one paper version at ($40), but would likely prefer a site license at 5 x ebook price ($100).
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