I think people will pay 10$ :)
On 06/21/2013 03:04 PM, Jack Krupansky wrote:
I’m expecting to self-publish the first Early Access Release for my book, Solr 4.x Deep Dive, on lulu.com sometime today. It is still far from finished and needs lots of work and missing a lot of important areas (SolrCloud and distributed Solr in general, DIH, highlighting, core and collection API, admin API and UI, query elevation, etc.), but I think there is a critical mass of useful material that is a decent foundation to build the rest of the book on. For those who participated in the early chapter review process for the book’s predecessor (Lucene and Solr: The Definitive Guide), most of those review chapters (at least the ones authored by me) are included, plus a bunch more, especially chapters on indexing data, update processors, and faceting. The new book is Solr-only. Alas, I have not incorporated most of the reviewer feedback yet as I have been focused on writing for the indexing and faceting chapters for the past two months. It will be e-book (PDF) only for the time being. Don’t even think about printing it yourself – over 1,100 pages, and counting! Currently a 5MB download. I still haven’t settled on pricing. For early access, the intent is that people will want to check back every couple weeks or month or two, more like a subscription. My current thought is to treat it as if it were a $60 to $80 paper book bought once per year, but on a monthly subscription, say $5 to $8 per download. My expectation is to update roughly every two weeks, or at least monthly, as new material is added, issues resolved, and new Solr releases. In the early going, I’ll probably update the PDF on lulu every week. Given this rough model, what price point has the most appeal: $2.99 (yeah, who doesn’t want it, but little incentive for me!), $4.99 (seems reasonable, but incentive for me is still low although marginally acceptable), $7.99 (starting to get steep for an EA multi-download), $9.99 (better incentive for me, but will people pay it?). Thoughts? None of this is cast in stone. My current thought is to publish this initial release at $4.99 or $7.99, and then set a revised price for the second or third release. If I hear nothing, I’ll go ahead with $7.99, although I might go with $4.99. Thanks in advance for any feedback! -- Jack Krupansky
