More on the Future of Books
The Next Web reports that last week, John Siracusa’s 27,300 review of Mac OS X Lion for Ars Technica (which I shamefully still haven’t read) made $15,000 to date at Amazon’s Kindle store. Sure, that’s probably most of the sales that will take place there, but that doesn’t include the ad revenue from people who read the review for free on the Ars website or the $5/month subscription fees paid by those in return for ad-free browsing or a downloadable PDF (via Stellar and @mediagazer). Ars should consider listing the past Siracusa tomes as ebooks too.
Of course you’re an awesome kind of nerd (evidenced by the fact that you’re reading this right now), so you listen to Siracusa every week as he co-hosts the devastating and scathing technology and tech-related culture podcast Hypercritical with Dan Benjamin on 5by5. So you know that Benjamin and 5by5 gave Siracusa a lot of well-earned promotion. I wonder if he could have made another $15,000 selling a much abbreviated review and transition guide? Or if many fewer sales would have been made without 5by5?
The old physical books won’t sell, but there might be new innovations in ebooks worth real money that we never even considered before. If you’re writing a book the questions you should ask are
why do you want to use a traditional publisher?
why are you writing one that’s longer than 100 pages?
I think there are good answers to both of the questions that would keep someone away from self-publishing a novella length ebook. I’m not saying anything new, but more and more long form writing, particularly non-fiction and academic research, will start looking much more like Siracusa’s review or at least Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation. And that makes me happy.
