Edgey,One thing I do (and plan to do for books) is first to publish them as dead trees and dumb byte form is to do audios/vids of each chapter with code demos. I think the learning process can be speedup quite a bit? Some things just cannot be explained on paper.

Code demos and videos are a great way to enhance learning, but don't forget that once written these also become infinite goods. If you want to be paid directly for these then get the money up front. The future fortunes of IP creators will be made by people who can exploit the infinite to sell the scarce. How to do this is not easy or obvious at the moment, but at least you are in a much better position than most authors as you have scarce products to sell.

QuoteOriginally posted by: QuantOptionQuoteOriginally posted by: AlanIn the end, I think it comes down to people's sense of fair play. If you look at a pirated book and getsome benefit from it, give the author a break -- buy a copy!yes, agree, sense of fair play, so why pay for the whole copy? maybe only a chapter was useful, maybe the book was useful only for a day?Actually, my standard is lower(higher?) than that. If I peek inside a technical book at amazon and find even a few pages helpful,I will generally order the book. The way I figure it, my work time is worth $X an hour. If the author will save me an hour,it's usually worth buying the book.

QuoteOriginally posted by: AlanQuoteOriginally posted by: QuantOptionQuoteOriginally posted by: AlanIn the end, I think it comes down to people's sense of fair play. If you look at a pirated book and getsome benefit from it, give the author a break -- buy a copy!yes, agree, sense of fair play, so why pay for the whole copy? maybe only a chapter was useful, maybe the book was useful only for a day?Actually, my standard is lower(higher?) than that. If I peek inside a technical book at amazon and find even a few pages helpful,I will generally order the book. The way I figure it, my work time is worth $X an hour. If the author will save me an hour,it's usually worth buying the book.There is also another argument which is also prevalent (e.g. IT) is that developers prefer to reinvent the wheel instead of applying existing engineering practice. And whose time is it?

iBooks AuthorForcing the author to sell the book only through Apple could be bad, but also good.Since Apple controls the channels, it might make piracy harder to implement (verification of "legitimate" books in library ?).Cuch, MJ, Alan, others: What are your thoughts on this ?

I looked briefly. Didn't see any mention of X -> iPad conversion, where X is one of (pdf,latex,ps)It would take one of those to get me interested. p.s. I will add, the idea of doing an interactive book on iPad or Kindle is intriguing. In my case, since I have Mathematica code, that's the part I would want to be interactive. Reminds me that we are inevitably catching up to one of my favorite novels:'The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'

Yes, even if the nanofabrication is not yet there, the content/connectivity part is almost there; software will do in some way or another what hardware cannot.

QuoteOriginally posted by: MCarreiraiBooks AuthorForcing the author to sell the book only through Apple could be bad, but also good.Since Apple controls the channels, it might make piracy harder to implement (verification of "legitimate" books in library ?).Cuch, MJ, Alan, others: What are your thoughts on this ?Trying to get a monopoly won't work and using proprietary formats is *not* the way to get market share. It feels like the 70s all over again. Then came the plug-compatible Amdahl computers.QuotenanofabricationWhat is that? QuoteDidn't see any mention of X -> iPad conversion, where X is one of (pdf,latex,ps)It would take one of those to get me interested. Indeed.

QuotenanofabricationWhat is that? From 'The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'; being able to create almost anything from raw materials, including sophisticated machinery (in a very small scale).It's one of my 3 favorite Neal Stephenson's books ("Cryptonomicon" and "Snow Crash" being the others).

QuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnQuoteOriginally posted by: MCarreiraiBooks AuthorForcing the author to sell the book only through Apple could be bad, but also good.Since Apple controls the channels, it might make piracy harder to implement (verification of "legitimate" books in library ?).Cuch, MJ, Alan, others: What are your thoughts on this ?Trying to get a monopoly won't work and using proprietary formats is *not* the way to get market share. It feels like the 70s all over again. Then came the plug-compatible Amdahl computers.Is it working with the Kindle format though ?

QuoteOriginally posted by: MCarreiraQuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnQuoteOriginally posted by: MCarreiraiBooks AuthorForcing the author to sell the book only through Apple could be bad, but also good.Since Apple controls the channels, it might make piracy harder to implement (verification of "legitimate" books in library ?).Cuch, MJ, Alan, others: What are your thoughts on this ?Trying to get a monopoly won't work and using proprietary formats is *not* the way to get market share. It feels like the 70s all over again. Then came the plug-compatible Amdahl computers.Is it working with the Kindle format though ?It seems that this is also an exclusive deal using a NON(pdf, latex) format. Our Boost C++ II book is next week and will be in pdf format. Exclusive deals are bad.I have doubts also about the quality of the formats. It reminds of the formats/DTP stuff Mrs. Cuchulain used in the earlly 90s.

We have now passed 5000 sales of the Quant Job Interview book. It is still going strong. About 90% have been with Createspace through amazon.com . My main gripes with Createspace are that it doesn't do hardbacks and that I have to cash a USD cheque each month, but otherwise they have been fine.

Mark,Congrats on the good sales figure for Interview.How do you set the price of USD80 for your More Math finance? i set mine at USD75, but am now unsure if this is a good sales strategy. Amazon does not give discounts for POD, so POD books with equivalent list price as other technical books, may end up being too expensive to the reader. i am not sure at what threshold it will start to hurt sales..furthermore the biggest market is still students. Any thoughts on this? ----------------------------------------------Author website: www.bubble-value-at-risk.com

well it's 1 dollar less than concepts.The book is also 500 pages which is quite large compared to most competitors. I suspect that the price does hurt some sales, however.

Does LSI australia provide a better deal for bookdrops for australasia authors?Any experience here?