I wonder how these statistics would look like if he really charged 1$ for each copy. It's risky to extrapolate, because people are surprisingly resistant to paying for stuff online, even if the price is extremely small.
That might be true, but it's worth at least looking at Apple's App Store, and noticing that if you make it easy enough, lots of people _are_ perfectly happy to pay 99c for 10 or 20 minutes worth of entertainment.
If Zed could find an easy enough way to let people give him just a little bit of money for his work, I suspect quite a lot of people would do so.
I think the barrier is that credit cards are pull and not push so people are hesitant to hand the capacity to pull over to very small operations which are often overseas and might be dodgy (or get hacked for that matter). Imagine if you made a purchase on a site and it gave you a string to then cut-and-paste into your e-banking (or you give them your ebank "email" and then you get an SMS confirm notice, which is closer to pull while still having that push feeling of control). Although, I am a little hesitant about SMS and banking now, having had to try to do some banking overseas and not being able to get the SMS confirm from a bank on a push (domestic paying of rent) operation.
Everybody mentions iTunes in this context, but nobody remembers there have been hundreds of failed companies that tried to sell MP3s online over the years. Apple is an exception, not the norm. They succeeded, thanks to the integrated platform and smooth user experience, but it doesn't mean that everybody will.
Hell, if I'm reading his twitterstream correctly, he's had 299 people pay him either $14.99 for a digital copy or $29.99 for a paper copy.
I don't know just how elastic the price/demand curve is (or what distorting effects the option of "free download" gives to that curve), but I could easily imagine more that a lot more than 10 times as many people might have chosen to pay ~$1.50 instead of ~$15.
The App store and iTunes are the first micro payment systems to really reach a mass market. It's so easy - click, and I get something.
If an app is 99 ct I am not going to go through the trouble to search for a torrent - I will just click on it, and not having to enter my cc details _yet again_ just makes it easier.
He could sell it in the iBook store no? Link from the web page directly to the iBooks store, done.
Lulu was supposed to help me get the book into Amazon.com, but they totally and completely failed at this. All I can do is point people at my lulu page and that's it. If they got their act together and actually put the damn thing into Amazon so people could get it on the kindle it would have been much better.
When I do the second edition, I'm going to really hammer Lulu and Amazon on the PR angle until they get their act together for independent publishers.
