Tim has announced O’Reilly is now offering books on a per chapter basis. That is you can buy an entire e-book, or just the chapter(s) you want, and it appears they will be rolling it out across their entire catalog. Tim likens this development to the music industry shift away from albums and toward singles:
One of the compelling lessons of the digital music revolution was that people wanted to acquire and share songs, not albums. The analogies to books are imperfect, because books tend to be more of an essential organic whole than albums, but even with books, especially reference or tutorial books, it’s certainly possible that someone wants only part of a book. Based on this idea, we’ve had a goal for quite some time to enable “by the chapter” purchase and download.
It also appears the content is to be delivered as DRM-free PDFs.
One of my primary competitors, O’Reilly has once again demonstrated how nimble they can be and even though many publishers have been working toward this goal, they will all be seen as following Tim’s lead on this one.
Time will tell if this model works for O’Reilly and in their usual transparent fashion I am sure we will get an update on sales in the near future.
Twitter Updates
June 18th, 2007
Publishing and Business