The book publishing industry is taking baby steps into the world of digital publishing (a.k.a., “ebooks”). Even technical book publishers, who one might expect would be on the vanguard, are only a few baby steps ahead of the rest. As a result, the technical book-buying public get strange offerings, such as:
- “Yes, we’ll sell you a PDF, but it’ll cost almost as much as a print edition”
- “Oh, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of books in our online access library, but you can only look at a few at a time, with restricted downloads and whatnot”
- “Look at our shiny new ebook reader! Publishers get the privilege of paying us 65% of list price for the honor of publishing for our shiny new ebook reader!”
As an IBM VP out of their Birmingham, AL office once intoned, “that dawg don’t hunt”.
At CommonsWare, we’re trying a different approach, one somewhere in between Baen’s Webscription and the traditional technical book publisher online offerings. In a riff on Baen’s pioneering program, we call ours the Warescription.
It’s pretty simple really: the entire CommonsWare library, in digital form, for $35/year per person. Whatever you download during that year is yours to keep, even if your subscription lapses, though you won’t qualify for any updates to existing titles, any new titles, or any Warescription-only digital publications. The digital forms are personalized for you, and we’d really rather appreciate it if you encouraged others to buy their own inexpensive Warescriptions, rather than give them copies of your own individual-use editions.
Right now, saying “the entire CommonsWare library” sounds rather goofy, since we our first book is weeks away from being available. But, we plan on 4-8 titles per year, so the library will flesh out soon enough. Besides, at $35/year, it’s like buying a PDF edition from one of those other publishers and getting updates, plus a bunch of future books, for free.
