מחשבות, מחשבים, ושאר דברי בלע

I had a beer with Scott Sigler,
For those who doesn't know him, Scott Sigler is one of the first to release a whole book in a weekly serialized podcast form.
At this very days, he is busy releasing his fifth book, Nocturnal, which follows Ancestor, Earth core, Infected and the Rookie.
Ancestor and Earth core have already been released as books, and Infected will out at 1st April, 2008.

We spoke about Podcasts, the future of the entertainment industry, about FireStats and more.
Me and Scott have a lot in common on this aspect, we both give something for free to gain exposure to as many people as possible, in understanding that the money will follows:
Step A: get Exposure to as many people as possible, even if it means to give your work for free. and not even try to fight those who may steal your work.
Step B: Find a way to make money, based on the large users/listeners audience you have acquired.
Scott`s way to do that is to sell the books. I can tell that I bought all his books until now, despite the fact that I've already received it for free in a form I find more convenient than paper form – a podcast.
The reason I bought the books is that I wanted to support Scott in exchange for the hard work he is putting into the books.
This is a numbers game, if 15% of Scott`s listeners will buy his books, he is doing pretty well already. if 30% of the listeners will tell their friends about it, and even tell them to download it for free – some of those friends will buy the books based on the recommendation because we are still living in a world where most people would rather buy a book than to download audio files.
in my case, I am thinking of releasing in the future a version of FireStats, or a plugin to FireStats, that will add advanced abilities that does not exist in the basic version. maybe graphs or reports – which will cost money.
just like for Scott, it's a game of big numbers. if a large enough percentage of the users of the free version will buy the extending plugin than the entire effort was worth while.
and of course, the bigger the number of users of the basic version, the larger the number of people which will but the plugin.

The publishing industry is a conservative industry, and it's hard to change it's perceptions.
What Scott and other Podcasters that releases books are doing is an attempt to change the perception of the publishing industry, which is really not used to the idea of publishing a book after it have been available on the web for free.
if Scott will manage to take off and infiltrate the mainstream media – and at this moment, the signals indicates that he will succeed – we will see a whole pile of new writers following his foot steps, when the good of them will get famous.

So Scott, Thanks for agreeing to meet.
i really enjoyed our conversation.
Next time we meet I`ll get you to sign Infected – ordered it from Amazon along with Cory Doctoro`s Little brother.

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