Interesting eBook Publishing Story
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,64563,00.html - An interesting article about TidBits, which runs eBook publishing at an astonishing rate, charges $5-10 per eBook, doesn’t include PDF copy protection, and pays out a 50% royalty rate to its authors. A pretty innovative concept. I’ll be surprised if another evil company tries to patent it as a business process soon.
Interesting tidbits(no pun intended):
Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers — the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.
None of the books has any kind of copy protection, though Adobe’s PDF format contains various digital-rights management mechanisms. “It’s not worth doing it all, because it just causes problems,” Engst said.
Engst asks his customers to treat the books as they would physical books: Feel free to share with a couple of friends, but don’t post them on the Net. Engst has been aware of no abuse, and none of the books has shown up on file-sharing networks.
They use eSellerrate for their online sales processing, quoted as being a popular tool for shareware publishers within the article.