What's your ideal ebook?
The Packt author site has an ebook survey posted. The question that catches my attention is: "How interesting would each of these eBook services be to you if we offered them at packtpub.com?"
And one of services they list is an option to buy a PDF of individual chapters of a book for $5 each. To me, that's a brilliant idea, but the question seems to assume the chapters will be available only after the entire book is written, reviewed, and published. That's fine. But what if chapters of the book were available as they were written. That means as I'm writing chapter six, people are buying reviewed and edited versions of chapters three and four.
After I wrote my first book, I felt that it took too long to get a book to market (about 9 months) on a rapidly evolving product such as Zenoss Core. I think that book could have been better served in a serialized, chapter-by-chapter format. At the time I started writing, the project documentation was the recipient of constant criticism. With each passing month, I felt I missed sales opportunities for my book as the project documentation got incrementally better. Of course, this is all hind-sight analysis.
If you believe there's a market for individual chapters of a book, then believing that there's a market for an ebook that's only one, two, or three chapters in sum begins to be a viable way to offer targeted content for less. Readers who are unwilling to shell out $20, $30, or $40 may be more
inclined to invest $5 or $10 to see if the content is worth it. As an author, I can commit less time to know if my content is on target and in demand. I can correct course or retreat. If it works out, I write the other seven chapters, call it book, and go fish.
I'd be interested to hear other opinions.
