An Excellent Publishing Idea

I just got a press release that O’Reilly publishing is now offering PDF versions of their books in single-chapter downloads. I love this idea because so often I’ve only wanted one or 2 chapters of a book, but had to buy the entire thing just to get what I wanted.

However, it does make me wonder about the specifics of the plan. What happens if there’s a book with a lot of chapters, and I purchase a few of them, and then decide to get the entire book? Will I be able to put those previous purchases towards the purchase of the entire book? Because if you’ve got a title with a lot of chapters, you could exceed the price of the entire book if you bought them one at a time, and say I’ve bought 5 chapters, and now I want to buy the entire book… now I’ve paid that much more for it when it would’ve been cheaper for me to just get the whole book to begin with.

All of that aside though, it’s an excellent idea and I’m sure these details will work themselves out as the program matures.

So rather than give you all the details myself, I’ll just paste the press release I received. I will say though that these chapter downloads are something those of us on Safari have enjoyed for quite some time. So I’m glad to see they’ve expanded the program.

Sebastopol, CA–In today’s Web 2.0 driven publishing marketplace, it takes new and creative strategies to get authors and their work noticed by web savvy readers. But even when it is noticed, today’s readers increasingly want content in new and convenient ways that suit their digital lifestyles. Along with traditional print formats, they want content they can read on computers, PDAs, and cell phones. For this reason O’Reilly Media–the pioneering publishing company that coined the term Web 2.0–has recently launched several innovative publishing programs aimed at delivering content in formats the tech generation craves.

Starting this month, O’Reilly Media customers have the option to purchase book content by the chapter in PDF format for $3.99.

“As with iTunes, our customers now have the choice of buying the whole book or just the part they want,” notes Allen Noren, project leader and O’Reilly’s director of online marketing. “I love the usability of these independent chapters. Each has its own table of contents and index.

They’re bookmarked and searchable. And they’re infinitely portable.”

O’Reilly initially rolled out this new feature on 714 books. All these titles are also presently part of the Copyright Clearance Center RightsLink project, which gives customers the option to purchase reuse rights of book content for their Intranets, newsletters, course packs, and websites.

For a real time understanding of the many new choices available for O’Reilly readers, check this example. Readers interested in Scott Raymond’s “Ajax on Rails” can find many appealing options when they click on this online catalog link:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527440/

https://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527440/

Along the right hand column there are clearly marked links to:

— Purchase the printed book for $39.99

— Purchase the entire book in a PDF format for $27.99

— Purchase a chapter for $3.99 each

— Purchase reprint rights for portions of the book

— Purchase a site license for the entire book or a portion of it

— And a link to read it online through Safari, an electronic reference library for programmers and IT professionals. A Safari subscription gives you complete access to the electronic versions of over 3,600+ of the latest and greatest books from more than a dozen publishers, including O’Reilly Media, Addison-Wesley, Adobe Press, and Peachpit Press.

While most publishers understand that technology is shifting the ground on which modern publishing thrived for nearly a century, few have the knowledge to implement the immediate and long-term challenges and opportunities presented by these innovations. O’Reilly’s new offerings of convenient and reader friendly formats is helping to build a successful future for publishers and authors in a digital era.