Distributing An Ebook Serial

[juh]

Hi all!

 

I am going to publish ebooks with BitTorrent Sync.

 

From 1998 to 2014 I regulary published satires, essays and apostils on my blog http://www.sudelbuch.de

 

In January I wrapped up these 600+ texts to a printed book (vol. 1/vol. 2) and an ebook. 

 

And then I decided to stop blogging and to distribute all upcoming texts as an ebook serial with BTSync.

 

It's a technical and literary experiment and I have no idea what will happen.

 

I switched from blogging to ebooks because I want to write longer texts. I observed that I don't like to read longer texts in the browser, so maybe my readers also don't like to read my texts if they grew longer. Further, I hope to get a closer relationship to my readers by using BitTorrent Sync. In 1998, when I started to blog on http://www.sudelbuch.de people could subscribe to a mailing list, and I distributed my postings via email too. This was a very personal approach and I got many comments.

 

If you know German and want to subscribe to my eBook BTSync serial, please click here!

 

As I am quite new to BTSync I would be grateful for your comments. I am going to update this posting as soon as I made my first experiences.

[juh]

First Update (2015-03-29)

 

I published the first five ebooks with BitTorrent Sync and my technical experiences are quite good. I saw no issues when I changed to Sync 2.0. The folder is marked with 1.4 and is still syncing with my readers. Kudos to the developers to make this transition so smooth. 

 

The new setup seems to disturb my readers. When they click on my share link and Sync is installed they don't understand why they should share with their other devices. This is not what they want to do. So this step might prevent people to actually install Sync and sync with my ebook repository.

 

The setup process for first time users is an issue for me, because my readers are mostly non technical people interested in humanities.

 

But there are other issues for my use case. I have the feeling that I shrink my reader base by homeopathic dilution. All internet users who want to reader about art & culture cannot just open a browser to read my texts, but have to download an ebook (first dilution). The remaining few cannot download the book via HTTP, but have to install a torrent programm, which dilutes the reader base by magnitude because most internet users never heard about p2p technologies (second dilution). Those very few that are willing to install the programm have to be sucessful right away. You never get a second chance (third dilution).

 

After two month of sharing my books I have to say that the experiment shows that time has not yet come to distribute a periodical via p2p technologies. I will go on with the experiment but I am looking for alternatives: http download from my website (www.sudelbuch.de) or distributing free ebooks via Google Play and Apple itunes.