From: Jagadeesh Venugopal
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: Subscription mode for books?
Tim,
Most software products change by the time the proverbial ink has dried on books that describe them. This usually means that book publishers are at least a few months behind the product curve. As a book reader, I am also disappointed when my $30-$50 investment in a particular book is rendered useless by obsolescence within 6 months.
How about publishing periodic updates to your most popular books? Rather than put out entirely new editions every six months, I dream of getting updates on what has changed, about twice a year. A brand new edition could happen every 1-2 years. And I am not necessarily looking for free updates either. I would be more than happy to fork out $5-10 for a biannual update that keeps my $30-$50 investment in a book current. If it doesn't make sense to sell updates at that price point, how about selling electronic copies of the update for that amount?
Jagadeesh
Jagadeesh,
This has always seemed like a really good idea to me, and we've even done a number of experiments to see if it was something people really wanted.
For example, rather than updating our entire set of X books when X11 R5 came out, we produced a single update volume. We then rolled the changes into all the books as they were reprinted. We did this again with the changeover to X11 R6.
These "update" volumes did fairly well, but mainly because they were covering a large enough set of books that they could add up to a book in their own right.
There are several overlapping problems that make distributing updates problematic:
- Since the majority of books are distributed through bookstores,
you need a form factor that looks and feels like a book, or
you can only reach a small percentage of the potential customers.
(And if you reach only a small percentage, you aren't printing
enough copies to make it cost effective.)
- What's more, because book distribution is inefficient, books sit in bookstores for months or sometimes even years. A customer who has previously bought a book might be glad of an upgrade, but a new customer isn't going to be too happy to be told that he needs to buy both the book and an upgrade.
You might think that providing updates via the web would solve both of these problems. But what we've found (for example, via the subscription program that we put in place for the "Deluxe Edition" books that we've been making available on CD Rom, only a very small percentage of customers really seem to want to subscribe for updates.
(There is a further issue that customers who DO subscribe want updates frequently, thinking that the web should make it possible to create updates whenever there is a change in the software. But in fact, the obstacle to timely updates is the time that authors and editors need to put in. They are often just not available for more than yearly updates.)
As a result, while we continue to experiment with subscription products, we think the best bet is still our "upgrade" policy. If a new edition of a book comes out, and you have previously purchased an earlier edition, you're entitled to a 25% discount on the new edition. You can get all the details here.
--Tim
