Dead-trees books and online books

January 05, 2007 · 5 comments

I buy books like nobody’s business, at least 10 a month. But I don’t read all of them. Most, I just read a few chapters, and that’s all I need. If I’m not enjoying it, engaged, and learning, I skip ahead or put it down entirely.

The latest book I laid my hands on was Crucial Conversations, and from the little I’ve read in it so far, it seems like it would be an amazing 50-page e-book. Isn’t that true of so many books? It really doesn’t required 250 pages to communicate what they have to say. Yet to justify printing, stocking, and selling a book, with all the profits that have to be made up the food chain, you can’t really sell a 50-page book.

Unless you’re self-publishing or publishing online.

Yet the truth is that the customer would be better served by having the same content delivered in 50 pages, because then we wouldn’t have to wade through another 200 to find the nuggets.

So thankfully, with ebooks or PDFs, publishing a 50-page book is fine, and you can charge, say, $10 or $20 for it, and it’s still a great deal for the customer looking for help on a challenge she’s facing right here and now, and it should be cheaper to write and review than 250 pages, too.

I hope to see a lot more of this, and I hope that more authors will see past the supposed requirements to write real, full-length books, and offer more of what the market really demands.

blog comments powered by Disqus

5 responses so far ↓

1 Gitte Wange // Jan 06, 2007 at 01:28 AM

And once again I would like to put a good word in for "Pragmatic Programmers":http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com. It's so wonderful to be able to buy books as PDFs, ready for download within 5 minutes and you can start reading. Such a wonderful concept I'm surprised I haven't seen it elsewhere.
2 Scott Hughes // Jan 06, 2007 at 08:28 AM

Ebooks are better, I agree. Only problem is that my eyes hurt from if I look at the computer screen too much. Thanks, Scott Hughes Book & Reading Forums
3 robin // Jan 07, 2007 at 08:42 AM

What do you think of this? http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/
4 Mark Aufflick // Jan 08, 2007 at 01:16 PM

To get even shorter, an ex-colleague of mine runs a personal wealth company that emails regular summaries of new books (See http://www.professionalwealth.com.au/index.asp?id=27 ). They aren't reviews, they are 10 page bullet point summaries of the book. You know if you want to buy the book, but if you don't you know the key premises behind the book which is often worth something.
5 Rasmus // Jan 10, 2007 at 10:59 PM

I heard American literature is worse, since authors get paid pr. page. Not sure how it works in e.g. Denmark.

Lars Pind

internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship