Even with so-called ‘old media’ book and newspaper publishers the world over griping about the danger posed to them by search engine content aggregation, online piracy and other bugaboos of the digital age, a major publishing house appears to be embracing the web with open arms: ResourceShelf points to an Information Today article reporting that Harper-Collins has fully published a business textbook online that is searchable, supported by Yahoo! ads – and free.
The book, Bruce Judson’s Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own, first appeared in hardcover in 2004, and the online experiment coincide’s with the book’s paperback debut. Judson’s homepage hosts the work, and also features audio interviews, book reviews and a search box for Go It Alone!’s text.
It was an almost inevitable move for the publishing industry, and it figures that Harper-Collins would be the first of the publishing giants to make it, since they’ve previously demonstrated a forward-looking bent; late last year they announced plans to digitize their books and find new ways to offer the content to consumers. And it seems they’ve partnered with the right author for the job; Judson is described as “an expert in Internet marketing and contextual advertising,” and he and Harper-Collins will share the online ad revenue.
Authors and publishers have previously opposed efforts to offer books this way, since pirates could copy and distribute works themselves, and some authors opposed contextual ads because others would stand to profit from their works – not, you know, like bookstores. To help discourage pirates, the book is not as user friendly as it could be; each page contains only a couple of hundred words, and the book can only be navigated forward or back one page at a time – naturally, this carries the added benefit of maximizing ad space.
So far this is the only book Harper-Collins plans to post online, and further such experiments would be tied to the Go It Alone! project’s success; the publisher hopes to trigger sales of the book even as online ads produce cash. Of course, the usual pitfalls of contextual ad campaigns apply. While the book is ostensibly geared toward would-be entrepreneurs, one chapter is riddled with ads for medical equipment because Judson “presents a test case involving a medical device company.” Still, we like the idea, warts and all, and hope it spurs innovative thinking by publishers and other established companies who seem reluctant to to acknowledge that the internet genie has long since left the bottle.
The central idea of “Go It Alone!” is that sophisticated, low cost Internet services now make it possible for individuals and small entities to create large businesses without lots of cash. The book was originally published in late 2004. Since then, a stream of new services that meet this criteria have been released at a vibrant pace.
As a consequence, I have just launched a new blog, Ventures Without Capital (http://www.VenturesWithoutCapital.com) with the goal of continuously identifying and describing the best low-cost Web services that will enable start-ups to become large, profitable businesses.—Bruce Judson