Chapter 3 of “Take Control of Your Digital Photos” Available
Jeff Carlson is continuing to work on his forthcoming “Take Control of Your Digital Photos” ebook, and we’ve just published Chapter 3, “Choose a Photo-Management Application,” on the TidBITS Web site. As with Chapter 2, “Shoot Smarter,” it’s available for free, but only to TidBITS members; everyone is welcome to read Chapter 1, “A Smart Approach to Photo Management,” to see where Jeff is headed.
Publishing this book in its entirety for TidBITS members as it’s being written is one of the ways we thank TidBITS members for their support. We also hope it encourages those of you who have been reading TidBITS for free for years to help us continue to bring you carefully considered, professionally written and edited articles each week (for more details, see “TidBITS Needs Your Support in 2013: Join Our Membership Program,” 17 December 2012).
In Chapter 3, “Choose a Photo-Management Application,” Jeff focuses his lens on the main applications available for managing your burgeoning collection of digital photos. Since it’s impractical to cover every program that has some nominal connection to photo management, Jeff first walks you through the features that are essential for effectively managing your photo collection, and then looks at how the different contenders meet his criteria. And remember, we welcome comments and questions on each of these chapters!
This form of publication really is a great idea that you should continue and develop. It has certainly made me happier with my membership. One thought: very often I need some specific information rather than a full 100 pages on a subject - like one chapter from this book or a specific part of one book about backups (what was that feature again that I seem to remember?). If necessary to buy parts of a Take-Controll-book that I dont own?
Some publishers have experimented with various approaches to letting people choose just the parts of a book that they want, but none have resonated with me as either a publisher or a reader.
For instance, if you subscribe to Safari Books Online, you can read just the chapters of a book you want, but you (or your employer) must pay a relatively high subscription fee. That money is then divvied up between the books you've read, weighted by the number of pages and the cover price of the book. So, while we're happy to have our Take Control books in Safari Books Online, the revenue we earn there is only about 3% of our overall business.
Another approach has been for very large publishers to let users mix and match chapters from books, so they can buy a full book made up of sections from multiple titles. I'm dubious about that for anything but textbooks, since the overall intent and linearity of the book is lost, and there's non-trivial infrastructure necessary to implement such a system. I presume that royalties are once again weighted by number of pages and cover price.
So whenever we look at this space, we struggle with the fact that our 150 or so titles really aren't sufficient for a mix-and-match approach, there's a lot of infrastructure involved in making any segment of a book available on demand, and it requires an entire concept of usage tracking for royalties that we don't currently have.
Hence this approach - we hope we're doing something that people like, something that will encourage them to support TidBITS, and something that won't hurt the eventual sales of the finished book, since it will be available in all the standard formats for a discount at the end of the project.
And it's kind of fun. :-)