On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 09:10:30AM -0400, John Winters wrote: > So I am thinking I should sell the book in PDF format on a CD-ROM. This would > reduce costs, allow up-dates and additions. Up-dates for example could be > sent via e-mail. CDROM is one distribution method, and it works well for people on low-bandwidth connections (like me). But it may further reduce your costs to just publish the book online. For instance, "Practical mod_perl" is published here: http://modperlbook.org/ If you publish online, you can maintain the "master" copy in simple, standards-compliant HTML and regenerate the PDF version periodically using free open-source tools like htmldoc: http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc The idea being that doing this allows you to present the exact same content in HTML format and PDF format at (nearly) zero effort and cost. (Oh -- and updates, which will presumably be much smaller than the entire book, can be made available for download. Anyone who the book on CDROM can just pull them down. This leaves you with the choice of either leaving the updates as-is in the oneline copy or incorporating them and generating a new version of the book, so that anyone subsequently downloading it gets the newest version.) The catch is getting paid for it. And huge amounts of debate have taken place over which revenue models work and which don't and how they should be done and how they are done and yadda yadda yadda. My take, for what it's worth, is that if people appreciate your work and find it useful, then they'll want to fund it. On the other hand, if people are determined to be parasites and not at least throw a few bucks your way, then there's really no effective way to stop them. ---Rsk *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Mar 24 2005 - 08:59:51 PST
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