I first saw Technorati show up in my referers early last week, but I'm just now getting a chance to play with it. It will take me some time to tour my own cosmos!

My first question is can I get additions to my list of inbound blogs and inbound links as an RSS feed?...

[The Shifted Librarian]

Technorati does have watchlists and this was my first question too.  So far the answer appears to be no, but even if it is I doubt that will last long.  These guys are too smart not to spot the opportunities that RSS presents.

Ack foo.

Writing computer books not recommended....

[Chomped the wonderfully depressing quote from The FuzzyBlog! ...]

I know some people have tried selling e-books themselves via their own websites.  But has anyone made a serious attempt to get the likes of Amazon to distribute independent efforts?

If that doesn't work is there a way to make money via a super-efficient publishing system.  Same as above, the publisher is soley responsible for taking the finished PDF, printing and distribution on a percentage basis.  Would anybody do it?

I'm probably showing my naivety again...

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

I honestly must admit I have entertained thoughts of being an author, but by the looks of it, maybe not. Which is a tad scary in it's own right, I grew up in this industry reading everything I could lay my hands on. I have thousands of books. If this is how badly the publishing industry treats authors, we are going to run out of computer books RSN.

Well, the last six months of bookstore browsing has only tempted me to buy about three computer books, so maybe the drought is already upon us. Not happy, Jan.

As to whether people can publish eBooks, as say PDFs, and get make a living out of it. I don't know. I hope it can be done, but I also know I am more likely to part with $90 for a book I can read on the train than $10 for a PDF that I have to print myself. Perverse, but true.

[Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla]

Me too.  My printer is an HP DeskJet 940c.  It's not slow and it's not terribly expensive to run.  I'm happy to print lots of 8-12 page articles in draft mode.  But the idea of printing a 400 page book, nah.  A book tends, if done right, to be just right in your hands.  200 pages of A4 inkjet paper doesn't have quite the same Wu.

Which is why I think there is an opportunity for a new streamlined publishing company.  Well more of a loosely coupled distributor really. Here's how I think it should work.

• You order the book via Amazon.
• Amazon take their sales cut, then pass the order on to the distributor.
• Distributor "prints" the book & ships it.  Recharges Amazon for their cut.
• Whatever is left goes to the authors + editor on a monthly basis.

The distribution company needs to have the capability of printing in small quantities to begin with maybe <100 copies.  When they have some idea of how sales are going they can shift up production run size appropriately.  I think this would be best done by the distributor outsourcing printing to a number of different printing companies themselves.  The distributor then acts as a hub and amortizes it's own costs.  Obviously this means printing will start out very expensive and (hopefully) get cheaper as sales rise.

This is why it is essential to use Amazon (or one of its contemporaries): Dynamic pricing.

Just as outfits like LetsBuyIt leverage more customers to lower the price, Amazon could use feedback to dynamically alter the book price & percentages based upon total sales.  This means that the book might start out at $60 with a %20 cut to the authors ($12), but when sales improve it could come down to $40 with a %50 ($20) cut to the authors.  If authors currently make $2-$3 a pop then this could work.

I'll put my crack pipe away now and try to drift back to reality...